MobileRead Forums - View Single Post

vinieux · 04-15-2016, 01:00 PM

I think there is some confusion with the way I use Calibre Portable so let me put everything down clearly.

I am a big fan of portable software (I have close to 300 of them), especially because they don’t need any installing and therefore stay out of sight from network admins of corporate laptops who keep a close watch on programs being installed.

That being said, I do not RUN any of my portable software off any external portable USB drive. I copy them to a partition on my laptop (which is usually always named G: for continuity and path consistency) and RUN them from there for obvious reasons of speed and efficiency. So I may back up my portable software on an external USB disk, but if I have to RUN any of those programs, I RUN them off my G: partition.

So, while my Calibre Portable may be backed up on an external hard drive, if I have to read a book or comic, I fire up Calibre Portable on my G: partition – the path is clear in the screenshot I posted earlier.

So now that this clarification is out of the way, let me put down the chronology of what happened.

1) I have had Calibre Portable working fine for over 5 years now as a portable that I RUN off my G: partition. When I am alerted of an update, I update Calibre Portable on my G: partition and then back it up on my external drive for safety’s sake. I never RUN/EXECUTE Calibre Portable from my external drive.

2) Now, a small back story on my Calibre Portable. At one point about 3 years back I decided to create different libraries for different genres of books – eg Fiction, Comics, Cooking, Copywriting, etc. When I tried this, I found that Calibre DID NOT do this in the Calibre Library folder (as I presumed it would) but in the root folder of Calibre Portable (ie, the same folder which contains caliber-portable.exe BUT NOT the Calibre folder which contains caliber.exe or ebook-reader.exe or caliber_parallel.exe, etc). This can be clearly seen in the screenshot above.

However, when I wanted to read a book, or switch libraries, everything worked JUST FINE. So I let it stay that way because it did not do any harm.

3) I backed up my Calibre Portable on my external hard drive when I knew I was getting a new laptop with Windows 8.1 64 bit, 8GB RAM. My earlier one was Win 7 64 bit 4 GB RAM.

4) I got my new laptop, created a G: partition and copied all my portable software including Calibre Portable into it.

5) Spent the first couple of weeks firing up Calibre Portable and reading my books as usual.

6) Realised that I had one library which had books that people in the office could use to better their knowledge, so I asked my admin if it was OK to install a third party freeware program. After showing him Calibre, he agreed, so I decided to INSTALL Calibre 64 bit.

7) All the documentation I read states that two instances of Calibre can use the same library with no issues, so I didn’t think twice. However, after I installed Calibre 64 bit, when I tried creating a library by pointing to the existing libraries in my Calibre Portable folder in my G: partition, nothing would work. I would repeatedly get an alert stating that Calibre cannot find any existing library in any of the folders I was pointing to. (I am not sure if I should have pointed to the default Calibre Library folder which just seems to have a single metadata.db file it in but no books or library folders. I only pointed it to my working library folders named Fiction, Comix, Cooking, etc).

8) So because my attempt to create a library in Calibre 64 bit didn’t work, I uninstalled Calibre 64 bit and after that when I tried reading a book using Calibre Portable on my G: partition, the error messages started. “Failed to read book. Failed to connect to worker process.”

9) Checked and saw that Calibre 64 leaves a lot of entries in the registry, so I reinstalled it, used Geek Uninstaller to uninstall it again and also get rid of orphan entries, and then even used Regedit to search for and delete any reference to Calibre 64 bit.

10) To be on the safe side, deleted my entire Calibre Portable folder from G: partition and copied it back from my backup external drive.

11) No difference in behavior when I tried reading a book using Calibre Portable. Got the very same error messages.

12) Checked the “Open With” settings of Calibre Portable and saw some strange references to ebook-viewer.exe in a C: drive folder called Calibre2 which simply did not exist anywhere. Changed those entries to point to the right folders containing ebook-viewer.exe. No difference, same error messages.

So, yeah, that’s about it. I will now spend this weekend trying to create a new folder with a fresh and blank version of Calibre Portable and create a small 10 book library within it. I will then check if that works fine, or gives me the same error messages…

A great pity since I have been a diehard fan of this program for so many years now.

04-15-2016, 01:00 PM	#20
vinieux Member Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2016 Device: none	I think there is some confusion with the way I use Calibre Portable so let me put everything down clearly. I am a big fan of portable software (I have close to 300 of them), especially because they don’t need any installing and therefore stay out of sight from network admins of corporate laptops who keep a close watch on programs being installed. That being said, I do not RUN any of my portable software off any external portable USB drive. I copy them to a partition on my laptop (which is usually always named G: for continuity and path consistency) and RUN them from there for obvious reasons of speed and efficiency. So I may back up my portable software on an external USB disk, but if I have to RUN any of those programs, I RUN them off my G: partition. So, while my Calibre Portable may be backed up on an external hard drive, if I have to read a book or comic, I fire up Calibre Portable on my G: partition – the path is clear in the screenshot I posted earlier. So now that this clarification is out of the way, let me put down the chronology of what happened. 1) I have had Calibre Portable working fine for over 5 years now as a portable that I RUN off my G: partition. When I am alerted of an update, I update Calibre Portable on my G: partition and then back it up on my external drive for safety’s sake. I never RUN/EXECUTE Calibre Portable from my external drive. 2) Now, a small back story on my Calibre Portable. At one point about 3 years back I decided to create different libraries for different genres of books – eg Fiction, Comics, Cooking, Copywriting, etc. When I tried this, I found that Calibre DID NOT do this in the Calibre Library folder (as I presumed it would) but in the root folder of Calibre Portable (ie, the same folder which contains caliber-portable.exe BUT NOT the Calibre folder which contains caliber.exe or ebook-reader.exe or caliber_parallel.exe, etc). This can be clearly seen in the screenshot above. However, when I wanted to read a book, or switch libraries, everything worked JUST FINE. So I let it stay that way because it did not do any harm. 3) I backed up my Calibre Portable on my external hard drive when I knew I was getting a new laptop with Windows 8.1 64 bit, 8GB RAM. My earlier one was Win 7 64 bit 4 GB RAM. 4) I got my new laptop, created a G: partition and copied all my portable software including Calibre Portable into it. 5) Spent the first couple of weeks firing up Calibre Portable and reading my books as usual. 6) Realised that I had one library which had books that people in the office could use to better their knowledge, so I asked my admin if it was OK to install a third party freeware program. After showing him Calibre, he agreed, so I decided to INSTALL Calibre 64 bit. 7) All the documentation I read states that two instances of Calibre can use the same library with no issues, so I didn’t think twice. However, after I installed Calibre 64 bit, when I tried creating a library by pointing to the existing libraries in my Calibre Portable folder in my G: partition, nothing would work. I would repeatedly get an alert stating that Calibre cannot find any existing library in any of the folders I was pointing to. (I am not sure if I should have pointed to the default Calibre Library folder which just seems to have a single metadata.db file it in but no books or library folders. I only pointed it to my working library folders named Fiction, Comix, Cooking, etc). 8) So because my attempt to create a library in Calibre 64 bit didn’t work, I uninstalled Calibre 64 bit and after that when I tried reading a book using Calibre Portable on my G: partition, the error messages started. “Failed to read book. Failed to connect to worker process.” 9) Checked and saw that Calibre 64 leaves a lot of entries in the registry, so I reinstalled it, used Geek Uninstaller to uninstall it again and also get rid of orphan entries, and then even used Regedit to search for and delete any reference to Calibre 64 bit. 10) To be on the safe side, deleted my entire Calibre Portable folder from G: partition and copied it back from my backup external drive. 11) No difference in behavior when I tried reading a book using Calibre Portable. Got the very same error messages. 12) Checked the “Open With” settings of Calibre Portable and saw some strange references to ebook-viewer.exe in a C: drive folder called Calibre2 which simply did not exist anywhere. Changed those entries to point to the right folders containing ebook-viewer.exe. No difference, same error messages. So, yeah, that’s about it. I will now spend this weekend trying to create a new folder with a fresh and blank version of Calibre Portable and create a small 10 book library within it. I will then check if that works fine, or gives me the same error messages… A great pity since I have been a diehard fan of this program for so many years now. Last edited by vinieux; 04-15-2016 at 01:35 PM.