My Eclipse 3.6 froze today at startup. I think what I did was that I clicked on the shortcut a bit too fast and two instances of Eclipse started running at the same time. I got an error message for one saying “workspace in use”. I killed the one that showed the error message but then my Eclipse will no longer start up.
I searched around for solutions.
The one that SORTA worked for me is below from here.
- cd .metadata/.plugins
- mv org.eclipse.core.resources org.eclipse.core.resources.bak
- Start eclipse. (It should show an error message or an empty workspace because no project is found.)
- Close all open editors tabs.
- Exit eclipse.
- rm -rf org.eclipse.core.resources (Delete the newly created directory.)
- mv org.eclipse.core.resources.bak/ org.eclipse.core.resources (Restore the original directory.)
- Start eclipse and start working. 🙂
However, just doing that did not exactly solve my problem. I ended up going to the .metainfo/.plugins/org.eclipse.core.resources/.project directory and started deleting random project and trial on error. I finally found the project that was the culprit and fixed my issue.
Another suggestion by a coworker that has worked before if Eclipse freezes at startup is:
- cd workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.ui.workbench
- Make backup of workbench.xml
- Edit workbench.xmlfile and remove all <editor> tags.
Pure-Essence.Net 
Ying, I destroy eclipse workspaces all the time, and usually the simplest thing to do is just delete the .metadata directory in the directory where your workspace is. Once you do that start eclipse using the shortcut that you have been using. It will create an empty workspace.
From there setup CVS again, and them import the projects from the directory that your workspace is in (make sure that the “copy to workspace” checkbox is UNCHECKED). That should put everything back to the way it was other than any servers you had configured.
I’ve never had much luck fixing a broken eclipse workspace once it has been messed up by one of the thousand ways that it can eat itself. Unfortunately my solution is kind of messy, and is really no different than creating a new workspace, but it does at least make it easy for getting changes you’ve made in your projects that haven’t been committed to version control.
Hope that helps
Gary
I was trying to avoid having to create a whole new workspace. It’s just so time consuming to have to check a million projects out from CVS again. Plus I’d have to reset my workspace settings again. This reminds me that I should just export my settings and put it somewhere safe to avoid all of that pain.