Report ID 61223318

jano_riha
After emptying "Trash" and clicking on a collection in "My Library" tree, Zotero announced "an error had occurred" and asked for Firefox to be restarted. The error may be or may be not related to problems with the ProQuest translator described in this thread (I only assume emptying Trash with deleted items not properly downloaded might have caused problems). Thank you for taking notice of this report.
JR

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Win XP SP2, FF 5.0, Zotero 2.1.8
  • dstillman
    edited August 4, 2011
    No problems with 304408427 here, and a translator shouldn't be able to cause a "disk I/O error" anyway. I'd recommend both checking your disk for errors and checking your Zotero database integrity in the Advanced pane of the Zotero preferences.
  • jano_riha
    Dear Dan,

    neither CHKDSK of both partitions, nor Zotero database integrity check showed anything significant. In the former case (CHKDSK), there were 888 unused index entries and a couple of bad clusters related to f3ahvoas.dll (Japanese keyboard layout) in the C: drive, and 22 unused index entries in the D: drive (where the Zotero application data are stored). There were no bad sectors on neither of the partitions. In the latter case (Zotero database check), there were no errors at all.

    However, I suggest the following explanation: when I experienced the problems described in the report above, the D: drive was full (I had not realised that at that time, so I could not have included it in my report). Zotero therfore could not have written to D: drive. This might have influenced both dowloading of attachments and emptying the Trash. Provided my theory is true, it would be great if Zotero could recognise there is not enough storage available, refuse to execute the respective command and so prevent FF from having to be restarted.

    To put my theory to the test, I have tried to retrieve the same record again. And, it works, in the very way Avram intended it to work. I have tested the other IDs mentioned in the thread on ProQuest , with the very same results, except I have not managed to find two of the original IDs (02650525, 304408427), but that is a problem of a different nature (either ProQuest internal inconsistency, or my mistake). So, I tend to accept my theory as valid.

    Regards
    JR
  • dstillman
    Provided my theory is true, it would be great if Zotero could recognise there is not enough storage available, refuse to execute the respective command and so prevent FF from having to be restarted.
    We can't do that unless we get a specific error message from Firefox/Windows. In your case it was a generic disk I/O error, so a crash was pretty much the appropriate action, since it wouldn't really be safe to do anything else.
  • dstillman
    Note, too, that actually running out of disk space is much different from an error message that an installer might give when it knows exactly how much space it would need to complete before actually trying. Running out of space is a pretty severe event, capable of causing all sorts of data corruption and other problems. A lot of apps will crash in that situation, and it should never be allowed to happen.
  • jano_riha
    Dear Dan,

    Thank you for your response. I am not a power user, so please, accept my apology for possibly dumb ideas. I have tried to find more information on the "NS_ERROR_STORAGE_IOERR". I have found notions in a bug report related to the interaction between FF and SQLite, and an error report on the Property-Bee page related to database back up. Could there not be an analogy somewhere? Do you think there is a problem with:
    1. FF,

    2. SQLite,

    3. the way I administer my PC?
    What would you suggest me to do? I expect you would probably reply I should have paid more attention to how much space there was on the respective drive. And you would be absolutely right about that. Still, in my opinion, although I am glad Zotero forces FF restart to prevent worse things to happen, the way it communicates the error is not understandable for an ordinary user. I have spent a lot of time to try to find out what actually happened and how could it be solved. A lot of time, which I need for writing papers. This is not to complain, but to explain how it looks out of the perspective of my current situation.

    Thank you for your comprehension.
    JR
  • dstillman
    This doesn't really have anything to do with Zotero. Just free up some disk space—or get somebody technical to help you do so—and don't worry about this again.
  • jano_riha
    edited August 5, 2011
    Dear Dan,

    I understand very well that, from your point of view, as your time for forum discussions is limited, my problem is solved by stating "free up some disk space... and don't worry". Certainly I had "freed up some disk space", otherwise I would not have been able to report on how the ProQuest traslator worked. By professing I was not a power user, I meant my knowledge on programming and technical problems is limited, not I was unable to realise one had to make a space on disk, when it was full.

    The problem is not solved by freeing space, because it is still there somewhere and can occur again. In my opinion, any software should prevent crashes and/or forced restarts. If Zotero cannot do it, because it depends on other software in this respect, then this other software (possibly FF) should do it. Or, the OS settings should be changed in a way, which would prevent such problems.

    I know you want and need to focus on Zotero itself, but no software works alone. That is why I hoped you could at least help me in searching for the right path to a permanent solution.

    Sincerely
    JR
  • ajlyon
    In most cases, your operating system will warn you when a disk is nearly full. I don't know how this is done in Windows, but Mac OS and at least some distributions of Linux have this as a standard feature.
  • adamsmith
    Right - so write to the Microsoft. Your OS should really warn you before you get even close to this situation.
    And yes, the way you administer your PC is partly at fault - it's generally not a great idea to have less than a couple of GB of free space on your HD - it will affect performance in all type of ways (as a rule of thumb I'd say have at least 10% of your HD capacity free). HD space is so cheap now that there is really no reason to fill up you disk.

    But as Dan says - all of this has nothing to do with Zotero - it just happened to occur while you were using Zotero. And Zotero's resources are very limited - there is just no way we can address general computer usage here. Microsoft probably has several hundred times as many people working full time on support as Zotero has total developers.
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