Eclipse: Workspace in use or cannot be created Error
- By Viral Patel on October 20, 2009
- J2EE
Lot of time when I am working in Eclipse, it get crashed due to some or the other reasons. Most of the time this is because I have opened a lot of applications that I am working on and this takes a bit of memory. So finally everything just get hanged and does not have enough RAM to work on. Thus, Eclipse just get hanged and what I do is to kill the eclipse process.
But next time when you try opening the workspace it gives you error “Workspace in use or cannot be created, choose a different one.”


This is because, Eclipse creates a .lock file in the workspace and make the workspace lock. This is to avoid opening the same workspace in different eclipse process.
But when Eclipse is crashed or you kill the process to free the memory, it does not delete the .lock file in workspace folder and thus you cannot open the workspace again with eclipse.

To avoid this problem, simply locate the .lock file in your workspace folder and delete it. Please do not delete the .lock file if eclipse is already opened.
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Ahh, thank you. Although I spotted my .lock file in the metadata folder (at the root of my workspace),
hi.when i am opening the eclipse IDE at that time it is giving me an error message -
” Workspace in use or cannot be created, choose a different one “.
when 1st time it gave me this msg i had opened a new workspace but each time i m opening IDE i have to create a new workspace.after my PC has been added to n/w it is not a;;owing me to delete any data that i had previously stored and previous workspace as well.So i made new workspace that is editable in which i had deleted the .lock file.then also it is giving me the same error.Please help meee……………….