Standalone detecting open copy of Zotero when none is running

plindset

I'm new to Zotero, using it on a Mac. Through a series of mishaps trying to backup my data, I've clearly screwed something up. Besides wiping out my initial data (not much, so no big deal), I can no longer start Standalone. I get the following message: "A copy of Zotero is already open. Only one copy of Zotero can be open at a time." No other copy of Zotero is running -- Firefox is shut down. I've tried uninstalling both the Standalone and the Firefix add-ons (twice) and I still get the message. Any help anyone can provide would be great.

plindset

resolved -- I found the problem

jsinger

I'm getting the same error. Could you please explain what the problem and solution was? Thanks in advance.

plindset

It seems that I had a few stray files from earlier versions that I needed to delete. These were being detected as "in use" when they were doing nothing. I deleted them and it solved the problem.

jsinger

What kind of stray files? Where might I look for these? Thanks again.

plindset

I'm hardly an expert here, but this is what I did. I suspected that, despite my effort to delete and reinstall, something was being left behind that wasn't in the right place. So I went to the "actions" button, scrolled down to preferences, and opened the dialogue box. There I found the location of the Zotero data files by pressing the "Show Data Directory" button. It was there that I found some old data files were causing the problem, in the old data directory that hadn't properly been deleted. At least that's what I thought I saw -- again, I'm not an expert -- maybe I just got lucky. I deleted the old directory files and then retried to open Standalone and it worked. It no longer detected another version of Zotero running. Sorry I can't be more specific. That's all I know.

jsinger

Thanks for the details. I tried this and reinstalled the standalone but am still getting the error.

Anyone from Zotero care to chime in? :)

TIA

Simon

Have you tried restarting your computer?

jsinger

d'oh! The old standby of solutions overlooked.

Thanks Simon!

zepsaslan

I have this very same problem now. I am checking the forum, there are two more reports of the same problem but I see that the only solution offered is to restart. Seriously?

Because of this problem I restarted the mac more than three times today and none of them were proper restarts, I had to manually shut down by holding the power button.

So please, any other suggesstions?

aurimas

Please start a new thread. It's unlikely that you're experiencing the same issue, since this thread is almost 3 years old, restart doesn't fix this for you, and you're having issues restarting. In the new thread include the exact error message you are getting (don't paraphrase or translate) and your OS version. Indicate the exact issue you are having with restarts, since that is very likely to have something to do with this. Have you tried installing the latest version of Standalone from zotero.org?