Recently I’ve begun to experience corrupted workspaces in my Eclipse IDE.  It generally coinsides to my Tomcat server unable to stop in a timely fashion.  Generally I have to kill Eclipse and restart.  Most of the time the workspace won’t restart.

Steps to recover from a corrupted Eclipse Workspace:

1. Shutdown/kill Eclipse
2. Open up a command prompt or terminal
3. Navigate to your workspace
4. Navigate to /.metadata/.plugins/
5. remove org.eclipse.core.resources (in terminal rm -r -f org.eclipse.core.resources)
6. Navigate to your Eclipse home directory
7. Run eclipse -clean
8. Launch the corrupted workspace
9. Re-import your projects; you should be able to re-import all projects straight from the workspace directory
10. Let the workspace refresh…DONE!

Clearly what this does is remove some Meta Data from the workspace.  By re-importing that Meta Data is restored.  I must say though that this is quit a number of hoops to jump through.  I’m just glad they aren’t firey hoops!

Hopefully someone will find this useful!