Calibre suddenly plays dead :-)

[Torontokp]

One fine day, I find that the Calibre I have installed on my Windows 8 machine is no longer able to access internet or my C drive. All my news subscriptions hang (Economist, for instance) and when I try to drag and drop a epub into Calibre, it shows the "not allowed" symbol (circle with a cross bar). When I try to add books using the Add Books option and say "single directory", at the point where I want to access C drive, it says "permission denied". I am the administrator of the laptop account and am using the admin account.

What could be the reason? I am technical but not too technical. Any help would be awesome.

I tried to uninstall and reinstall Calibre with no success. The problem persists.

-- Krishna

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Torontokp

One fine day, I find that the Calibre I have installed on my Windows 8 machine is no longer able to access internet or my C drive. All my news subscriptions hang (Economist, for instance) and when I try to drag and drop a epub into Calibre, it shows the "not allowed" symbol (circle with a cross bar). When I try to add books using the Add Books option and say "single directory", at the point where I want to access C drive, it says "permission denied". I am the administrator of the laptop account and am using the admin account.

What could be the reason? I am technical but not too technical. Any help would be awesome.

I tried to uninstall and reinstall Calibre with no success. The problem persists.

-- Krishna

99% chance your firewall software did a (bad) update and blacklisted Calibre.

You will need to 'exclude'/OK calibre.exe (you probably the full path to it)

[BetterRed]

@Torontokp It sounds like you don't have (have lost) read/write access to the Calibre library folder.

It seems to happen on some Windows 8 installations, but most often with the Temp location, rather than the Library. This might help http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq....ror-on-windows - try resetting the ACL on the Library folder

But can you try something before you fix the ACL's. Using File Manager try to copy some arbitrary file into one of the existing book folders in a Calibre Library, if that works try to create an "Dummy Author" in the Calibre Library and within it a "Dummy Book" folder.

Then 'undo' what you just did.

If that all works then it begs the question - why can't calibre do the same thing?

Is your Windows 8 an upgrade from 7, a factory/dealer install or did you install to a blank system from a Retail Windows 8 DVD.

I've installed Calibre on a dozen or so Win 8 systems, and none of the users have experienced these issues. But in each case I also installed Windows Retail onto a freshly partitioned and formatted drive.

BR

[Torontokp]

Thanks guys. I tried the dummy book and author and I can easily create a directory directly under C:\Calibre\Calibre Library. No problems.
The weird thing is that it cannot even download anything from internet.
Here is what I did so far, all to no avail.
1. Copied the current calibre library to another location
2. Uninstalled Calibre
3. Physically removed Calibre directory (delete from C:\)
4. Reinstall Calibre 1.5.0
5. Try to add a book (no success) or download Economist (no success) or download another magazine at random (no success)
6. Clean all registry entries that have the word calibre and redo the whole thing and try again all of he steps in 5 (no success)
7 Run Calibre as Administrator and then try (no success)

I still do not know why this happens.

But nice to know that there is a community out there that helps!

[Torontokp]

Originally Posted by theducks

99% chance your firewall software did a (bad) update and blacklisted Calibre.

You will need to 'exclude'/OK calibre.exe (you probably the full path to it)

----> Do not have any firewall. This is my home PC direct to Fibe Internet.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Torontokp

----> Do not have any firewall. This is my home PC direct to Fibe Internet.

You disabled the W8 built in FW without replacing it?

[AnotherCat]

It still sounds rather like it may be a permissions matter, however, it may acting correctly in preventing access to Calibre. Even though you can manually add files to your C:\Calibre directory with File Explorer it still may be that security is preventing an application (such as Calibre) from doing so. Windows 8 is stricter on C: drive security than previous versions.

The easiest way to test this without getting involved in changing the C: drive's default permissions is if your drive is partitioned to have a D: (or other) drive, then just try moving your library onto that to see if that solves it.

If your drive is not partitioned then try putting your library into your user account's area of C:\Users\username\... , preferably in Calibre's default library folder (sorry I do not recall what that is, I have always kept my libraries off the C: drive, but should be easy enough to determine or someone will advise). C:\Users\... is where applications are supposed to write to if they wish to write to that drive.

Alternatively, if your drive is not partitioned, you could just try copying the library to a USB stick or drive and select that as the library from within Calibre and see if it works. If that works then easiest is to then move your library into C:\Users... as described above, and where it should still continue to work.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

Windows 8 is stricter on C: drive security than previous versions.

Didn't know that - my long standing 'best practice' policy is to keep data on a separate drive or partition

@Torontokp

1. Copied the current calibre library to another location

What's its new location?

When you say you "can't download anything from the internet" I assume you mean via Calibre - eg metadata & covers etc. What about plugins - are you able to install any via Preferences->Plugins->Get new plugins, I think they may come from Mobileread!

When you download anything from the 'net then I think its written to disk, usually in the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp folder - this is the one that's referred to in the link I posted before. I am guessing that Calibre's also getting permissions problems there - which is what the icacls command has been known to fix.

I think Calibre conversions also use the Temp folder.. so are you able to do a conversion?

Yesterday I had the thought - 'haven't seen any permissions problems for a while' - which leads me to ask is Windows up to date with patches? Maybe Redmond fixed something.

EDIT : If you have installed 64bit Calibre, try installing the 32bit version. Doing that has solved a few issues. You can have both installed - but you can only run one of them at any one time.

BR

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Didn't know that - my long standing 'best practice' policy is to keep data on a separate drive or partition.

A simple example is that it is no longer easy to save a file or edit an existing one in the root of C:\.

Me too on the long standing separate drive or partition policy.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Didn't know that - my long standing 'best practice' policy is to keep data on a separate drive or partition

@Torontokp



What's its new location?

When you say you "can't download anything from the internet" I assume you mean via Calibre - eg metadata & covers etc. What about plugins - are you able to install any via Preferences->Plugins->Get new plugins, I think they may come from Mobileread!

When you download anything from the 'net then I think its written to disk, usually in the C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp folder - this is the one that's referred to in the link I posted before. I am guessing that Calibre's also getting permissions problems there - which is what the icacls command has been known to fix.

I think Calibre conversions also use the Temp folder.. so are you able to do a conversion?

Yesterday I had the thought - 'haven't seen any permissions problems for a while' - which leads me to ask is Windows up to date with patches? Maybe Redmond fixed something.

EDIT : If you have installed 64bit Calibre, try installing the 32bit version. Doing that has solved a few issues. You can have both installed - but you can only run one of them at any one time.

BR

I used to do that when drives were small (40M) and slow.
Now I do that because computers are faster and modern data is huge (there were no quality audio or video files in the era of the PC-XT)

[Sefiriot]

I usually keep all my data off C:\ as much as possible, anyway. Never trust a Windows system drive.

As for plugins and where they come from: starting from v1.x, the plugins come from plugins.calibre-ebook.com, which scans and mirrors this site once an hour, according to Kovid. In any case, you do need to be able to read and write to \AppData\Local\Roaming to install plugins; I'm not sure if that's still true on Win8 however, but I don't see why it should change. And yeah, calibre does use the \Temp folder for writing file downloads before it assembles it into a book and puts it in the library.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Sefiriot

As for plugins and where they come from: starting from v1.x, the plugins come from plugins.calibre-ebook.com, which scans and mirrors this site once an hour, according to Kovid.

Aaaah, that explains why Kiwidudes recent updates took 'so long' to get pushed; must have missed seeing that when I read the 1.x Release Notes. That's the problem with skimmy reading

BR

[Sefiriot]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Aaaah, that explains why Kiwidudes recent updates took 'so long' to get pushed; must have missed seeing that when I read the 1.x Release Notes. That's the problem with skimmy reading

BR

I got that info from a post Kovid made in the FanfictionDownloader plugin thread, actually; I don't think it was actually mentioned in release notes, so don't feel too bad if you didn't know.