Report 125278658

spicedreams

Occurred on startup.
I almost never get a good startup these days. I have upgraded Firefox, removed and reinstalled Zotero time and time again. Mostly I never even get as far as the Gears menu to report the error. Occasionally it works. Zotero Standalone appears to work except that I have not yet worked out how to use it- how do I capture a reference from my browser (Firefox) into Zotero standalone?

What else can I tell you that the automated report doesn't?

dstillman

Try disabling all of your other Firefox extensions.

spicedreams

Sure. are there any I should particularly focus on?

dstillman

The first step is to disable them all. If the problem goes away you can enable half at a time to quickly find the problematic one.

Known incompatibilities are here:

http://www.zotero.org/support/known_issues#incompatible_extensions_and_applications

spicedreams

about:addons now shows the only addon enabled is Zotero 3.0b2.

I still get 'an error has occurred. Please restart Firefox' when clicking the Zotero icon in the bottom par.

This time the option to report errors under the Gears menu is grayed out.

dstillman

Go to about:config, right-click on extensions.zotero.sourceList.persist, and click Reset, and then restart Firefox. (Do a Copy Value first for good measure, since if that fixes it it will be helpful to see what the value was.)

spicedreams

extensions.zotero.sourceList.persist doesn't exist.

I have extensions.zotero.sortNotesChronologically and extensions.zotero.statusBarIcon but nothing in between.

Does that help?

dstillman

Try deleting localstore.rdf from your Firefox profile directory and restarting Firefox. That file stores window settings and will be recreated automatically.

If that doesn't fix it, disable auto-sync in the Sync pane of the Zotero preferences, close Firefox, and rename your Zotero data directory ('zotero') to 'zotero2'. Then restart Firefox, which will create a new empty Zotero data directory. See if the error occurs in that.

spicedreams

Thanks Dan.
The error does not happen after I rename D:\Documents and Settings\%user%\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%random%.default\zotero to .\zotero2

dstillman

OK, and does it now recur when you rename it back?

If so, check your database integrity in the Advanced pane of the Zotero preferences.

dstillman

If the integrity test passes, try closing Firefox, renaming prefs.js in your Firefox profile directory, and restarting Firefox. If that doesn't fix the problem, rename it back.

spicedreams

Hi Dan,
I renamed ztoero2 back to zotero and the error returned.
I checked database integrity- it reported back fine.
I closed firefox, renamed prefs.js and restarted firefox- still got the error. Firefox created a new prefs.js which I deleted, then I renamed the old one back. I still get the error.

I checked the files under the Zotero directory (in the Firefox profile)- they are all owned by my user account.

I did spot 4 files with names like '???? ?? ??????????.js' in the translators directory. I could not open them with a text editor- Windows said 'invalid path'. However I deleted them and still get the error starting Zotero.

Zotero shows the organisation inside My Library, but no tags and nothing in the references list pane. Does that help any?

dstillman

If you want, you can upload your database to the DB Repair Tool and e-mail the Upload ID to support@zot....org with a link to this thread, and we can see if we can reproduce this. Don't post your Upload ID publicly. You can ignore the download link the tool provides, since it's unlikely to fix this.

spicedreams

Thanks Dan, I have uploaded my database as you suggest.

Zotero Standalone seemed fine with the database, but actually blew up with an error when I tried to move up/down the duplicated records list with the keyboard arrow keys.

dstillman

That could easily be unrelated (and quite possibly fixed in the latest dev version). Are you saying the original error is now fixed?

spicedreams

No, the error remains.

Sorry, the upload has failed a couple of times now with Internal Server Error. I'll try again tomorrow.

dstillman

Don't worry—I found the file on the server. I can't reproduce the error you're getting, though, using 3.0b2.

Try installing Zotero 3.0b2 into a new Firefox profile, restarting Firefox to create an empty Zotero data directory, and then closing Firefox and copying your existing zotero.sqlite into that directory.

spicedreams

OK, did that and Zotero now seems OK with my database.
I have of course lost access to a shed-load of settings and so on.

So where from here?

Thanks

dstillman

The easiest thing to do is probably to copy over your old data, including your complete Zotero data directory (not just zotero.sqlite). Something is broken in your old profile, but we already tried the most likely candidates, so at this point you should just switch to the new profile. Once you're sure you have all your data in the new profile, make a backup copy of the old profile directory and delete it from the Profile Manager.

spicedreams

Stink.
Once I copied across my whole profile to the new profile path, I get the same error as before.
"report errors" is grayed out.

dstillman

What do you mean by "whole profile"? Your Zotero data directory, or your whole Firefox profile? You can't copy your whole old Firefox profile over, since something in it is causing the error—the point of this is to copy over your Zotero data and select data (bookmarks, cookies, etc.) from your old profile.