Calibre error in Windows 8.1 - Page 2

vinieux · 04-15-2016, 02:53 AM

Quote:

The Calibre Library folder is the default library, and libraries cannot be nested. Calibre Portable anticipates the libraries will located in the same folder as the executable which is exactly where yours are

BetterRed.... My Calibre Library folder (as shown in the screenshot posted earlier in this thread) is EMPTY. All my libraries exist in folders by their own names (Fiction, Cooking, Comix, etc) and they reside in the same root folder as calibre-portable.exe, but NOT in the Calibre folder which has calibre.exe, ebook-viewer.exe and so on. Scroll up in this thread to see the screenshot.

Also, I did nothing to make this happen. Calibre Portable did this by itself when I started creating separate libraries for different genres of books many years ago.

vinieux · 04-15-2016, 02:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Where did you install 64 bit calibre. The above statement implies its installed it on your portable drive in the place where you have calibre portable.

I installed it in C: Drive, the default folder in which it installs itself when you click on the executable. I made no changes whatsoever, and I would not install any program in any other drive than C:.

All my portable software including Liberkey, Portable Apps and Calibre Portable are in G: drive which the official network admin has no reason to access or play with.

vinieux · 04-15-2016, 02:59 AM

Quote:

The Calibre Library folder is the default library, and libraries cannot be nested. Calibre Portable anticipates the libraries will located in the same folder as the executable which is exactly where yours are

BetterRed.... My Calibre PORTABLE Library folder (as shown in the screenshot posted earlier in this thread) is EMPTY. All my libraries exist in folders by their own names (Fiction, Cooking, Comix, etc) and they reside in the same root folder as calibre-portable.exe, but NOT in the Calibre folder which has calibre.exe, ebook-viewer.exe and so on. Scroll up in this thread to see the screenshot.

Also, I did nothing to make this happen. Calibre Portable did this by itself when I started creating separate libraries for different genres of books many years ago.

BetterRed · 04-15-2016, 03:14 AM

As I said the libraries are exactly where I would expect them to be - in the folder into which you installed calibre portable G:\My Ebooks\Calibre. Today I would expect the G:\My Ebooks\Calibre\Calibre Library folder to contain one file - metadata.db. But I don't know what might have been put there 5 years ago.

I must admit to being confused, I thought portable calibre was working off your portable drive on the new 8.1 laptop. But I note your G: drive is labelled "Local Drive" which makes me wonder if it might be an internal drive/partition.

I'm going to bow out.

BR

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.

kovidgoyal · 04-15-2016, 01:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You can try restarting calibre in debug mode (right click the preferences button) but I doubt that will tell us anything.

Is there some reason you are ignoring this advice and refusing to post a debug log?

vinieux · 04-15-2016, 02:11 PM

Will do it tomorrow definitely, but did not do it right now because of your own caveat that it may not tell us anything.

Thank you for telling me.

vinieux · 04-15-2016, 04:42 PM

Here is the debug log:

calibre Debug log
calibre 2.54 Portable embedded-python: True is64bit: False
Windows-8-6.2.9200 Windows ('32bit', 'WindowsPE')
32bit process running on 64bit windows
('Windows', '8', '6.2.9200')
Python 2.7.9
Windows: ('8', '6.2.9200', '', 'Multiprocessor Free')
Successfully initialized third party plugins: Open With && Find Duplicates
Starting up...
Started up in 2762.59 seconds with 1677 books

BetterRed · 04-15-2016, 07:12 PM

@vinieux -

for the detailed explanation, much clearer now.

Everything you did should have worked. In the attached screen shots you'll see calibre 64 bit accessing a library within a Calibre Portable library folder - exactly as you tried to do. And the same library being accessed via the calibre_portable.exe.

I suspect Geek Uninstaller hasn't caught up with MS's latest registry entries regarding Default programs and Open With etc. This issue has been recently discussed in this thread Install/Uninstall Windows 10 calibre. In particular I draw your attention to posts #2 and #9 from Kovid.

Hopefully they will assist you in getting your Calibre Portable install working again, and in the case of the environment variable prevent the 'unholy mess'/ 'calamities on toast' being created in the first instance.

Two other things to remove before you reinstall 64 bit are the ...\AppData\Roaming\calibre and ...\Documents\Calibre Library (the default library) folders That will ensure you get a virgin install. When you start calibre it will open the default library - there should be one book in the library a Calibre Introduction by John Schembler.

If you take a system restore point immediately before you install the 64 bit version, and things don't work again you could do a system restore back to that state. The 3rd screen shot shows an example, if I did the restore selected, it would put me back to the state before I did the registry edits - including backing out the calibre 2.55 update and reinstating the out of cycle Flash Patch.

BR

Capabilities and Toasts are two of the registry subkey names that contribute to what Kovid refers to as an 'unholy mess' - hence my 'calamities on toast'

kovidgoyal · 04-15-2016, 10:14 PM

Quote:

Started up in 2762.59 seconds with 1677 books

Is your calibre really taking 46 minutes to start up? If so there is something seriously wrong.

vinieux · 04-16-2016, 12:08 AM

No, it does take a little longer than usual, but I got busy with something so didn't open the log till much later.

Thank you for your replies Kovid and Red. Let me do some spadework over the weekend and I'll let you know the results...

I did clean out all those folders by the way Red when I used Geek Uninstaller. It specialises in doing this - getting rid of leftover entries. Also, nothing I did would make the 64 bit read the libraries in the portable folders. All I got was an error saying there is no library available in the location you are pointing to.

My aim is to get back to a working PORTABLE version, I do not want Windows writing into the registry for whatever reason regardless of whether the admin gives me a thumbs up or not. So no more 64 bit for me.

vinieux · 04-16-2016, 12:19 AM

By the way, is there any known issues with Kaspersky antivirus? Because the office has just shifted to this from Symantec and I am not sure if this could be a cause.

Another debug log:

calibre Debug log
calibre 2.54 Portable embedded-python: True is64bit: False
Windows-8-6.2.9200 Windows ('32bit', 'WindowsPE')
32bit process running on 64bit windows
('Windows', '8', '6.2.9200')
Python 2.7.9
Windows: ('8', '6.2.9200', '', 'Multiprocessor Free')
Successfully initialized third party plugins: Open With && Find Duplicates
Starting up...
Worker Launch took: 16.757999897
Worker Launch took: 29.0360000134
Worker Launch took: 42.7660000324
Started up in 243.03 seconds with 1677 books

kovidgoyal · 04-16-2016, 12:40 AM

Like I said before, your original error message implies something is blocking the viewer from communicating with its worker process. The most likely suspect for that is an antivirus program.

BetterRed · 04-16-2016, 02:29 AM

@vinieux- there have been problems with K//aspersky from time to time. It would be better if you did a a search of the Calibre forum for Kaspersky and reached your own conclusions. Many of the AV packages and security suites have caused problems at some time or other - have you tried accessing your portable in Safe Mode with no internet and Kaspersky disabled (if it permits) and/or exclude the calibre portable folder on G: from Kaspersky's processing.

Also have a look at the FAQ Miscellaneous section in the calibre user manual, it documents a number of 3rd party products that have been known to cause problems - not always for everyone who uses them - Wacom devices and SpiderOak are a couple that spring to mind.

BTW did you use the Free version of Geek Uninstaller or the Pro version, latter claims to do a deeper scan, no idea if that's so. Could be that it only does that if it monitored the actual install when it would create an transaction log to use to rollback changes when doing the uninstall. That's how some other Pro Uninstallers work - like Revo and IOBit.

BR

vinieux · 05-28-2016, 04:20 AM

SOrry for not updating earlier but I have been travelling a bit and there has been some stress at work.

I'm delighted to let you know that I finally identified the culprit and indeed it was Kaspersky. I whitelisted Calibre in Kaspersky (had to get my admin in the office to do it since I do not have admin access), and everything is just fine.

The red herring in the entire thing was my attempting to install 64 bit Calibre which I thought was the cause of the issue.

Many thanks for your help and apologies to all for the confusion.

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.

04-15-2016, 07:12 PM	#24
BetterRed null operator (he/him) Posts: 21,763 Karma: 30237526 Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Sydney Australia Device: none	@vinieux - for the detailed explanation, much clearer now. Everything you did should have worked. In the attached screen shots you'll see calibre 64 bit accessing a library within a Calibre Portable library folder - exactly as you tried to do. And the same library being accessed via the calibre_portable.exe. I suspect Geek Uninstaller hasn't caught up with MS's latest registry entries regarding Default programs and Open With etc. This issue has been recently discussed in this thread Install/Uninstall Windows 10 calibre. In particular I draw your attention to posts #2 and #9 from Kovid. Hopefully they will assist you in getting your Calibre Portable install working again, and in the case of the environment variable prevent the 'unholy mess'/ 'calamities on toast' being created in the first instance. Two other things to remove before you reinstall 64 bit are the ...\AppData\Roaming\calibre and ...\Documents\Calibre Library (the default library) folders That will ensure you get a virgin install. When you start calibre it will open the default library - there should be one book in the library a Calibre Introduction by John Schembler. If you take a system restore point immediately before you install the 64 bit version, and things don't work again you could do a system restore back to that state. The 3rd screen shot shows an example, if I did the restore selected, it would put me back to the state before I did the registry edits - including backing out the calibre 2.55 update and reinstating the out of cycle Flash Patch. BR Capabilities and Toasts are two of the registry subkey names that contribute to what Kovid refers to as an 'unholy mess' - hence my 'calamities on toast' Attached Thumbnails Last edited by BetterRed; 04-15-2016 at 10:29 PM.

04-16-2016, 12:08 AM	#26
vinieux Member Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2016 Device: none	No, it does take a little longer than usual, but I got busy with something so didn't open the log till much later. Thank you for your replies Kovid and Red. Let me do some spadework over the weekend and I'll let you know the results... I did clean out all those folders by the way Red when I used Geek Uninstaller. It specialises in doing this - getting rid of leftover entries. Also, nothing I did would make the 64 bit read the libraries in the portable folders. All I got was an error saying there is no library available in the location you are pointing to. My aim is to get back to a working PORTABLE version, I do not want Windows writing into the registry for whatever reason regardless of whether the admin gives me a thumbs up or not. So no more 64 bit for me. Last edited by vinieux; 04-16-2016 at 12:13 AM.

04-16-2016, 12:19 AM	#27
vinieux Member Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2016 Device: none	By the way, is there any known issues with Kaspersky antivirus? Because the office has just shifted to this from Symantec and I am not sure if this could be a cause. Another debug log: calibre Debug log calibre 2.54 Portable embedded-python: True is64bit: False Windows-8-6.2.9200 Windows ('32bit', 'WindowsPE') 32bit process running on 64bit windows ('Windows', '8', '6.2.9200') Python 2.7.9 Windows: ('8', '6.2.9200', '', 'Multiprocessor Free') Successfully initialized third party plugins: Open With && Find Duplicates Starting up... Worker Launch took: 16.757999897 Worker Launch took: 29.0360000134 Worker Launch took: 42.7660000324 Started up in 243.03 seconds with 1677 books Last edited by vinieux; 04-16-2016 at 12:25 AM.

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04-15-2016, 03:14 AM	#19
BetterRed null operator (he/him) Posts: 21,763 Karma: 30237526 Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Sydney Australia Device: none	As I said the libraries are exactly where I would expect them to be - in the folder into which you installed calibre portable G:\My Ebooks\Calibre. Today I would expect the G:\My Ebooks\Calibre\Calibre Library folder to contain one file - metadata.db. But I don't know what might have been put there 5 years ago. I must admit to being confused, I thought portable calibre was working off your portable drive on the new 8.1 laptop. But I note your G: drive is labelled "Local Drive" which makes me wonder if it might be an internal drive/partition. I'm going to bow out. BR

04-15-2016, 02:11 PM	#22
vinieux Member Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2016 Device: none	Will do it tomorrow definitely, but did not do it right now because of your own caveat that it may not tell us anything. Thank you for telling me.

04-15-2016, 04:42 PM	#23
vinieux Member Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2016 Device: none	Here is the debug log: calibre Debug log calibre 2.54 Portable embedded-python: True is64bit: False Windows-8-6.2.9200 Windows ('32bit', 'WindowsPE') 32bit process running on 64bit windows ('Windows', '8', '6.2.9200') Python 2.7.9 Windows: ('8', '6.2.9200', '', 'Multiprocessor Free') Successfully initialized third party plugins: Open With && Find Duplicates Starting up... Started up in 2762.59 seconds with 1677 books

04-16-2016, 12:40 AM	#28
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,388 Karma: 27756918 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	Like I said before, your original error message implies something is blocking the viewer from communicating with its worker process. The most likely suspect for that is an antivirus program.

04-16-2016, 02:29 AM	#29
BetterRed null operator (he/him) Posts: 21,763 Karma: 30237526 Join Date: Mar 2012 Location: Sydney Australia Device: none	@vinieux- there have been problems with K//aspersky from time to time. It would be better if you did a a search of the Calibre forum for Kaspersky and reached your own conclusions. Many of the AV packages and security suites have caused problems at some time or other - have you tried accessing your portable in Safe Mode with no internet and Kaspersky disabled (if it permits) and/or exclude the calibre portable folder on G: from Kaspersky's processing. Also have a look at the FAQ Miscellaneous section in the calibre user manual, it documents a number of 3rd party products that have been known to cause problems - not always for everyone who uses them - Wacom devices and SpiderOak are a couple that spring to mind. BTW did you use the Free version of Geek Uninstaller or the Pro version, latter claims to do a deeper scan, no idea if that's so. Could be that it only does that if it monitored the actual install when it would create an transaction log to use to rollback changes when doing the uninstall. That's how some other Pro Uninstallers work - like Revo and IOBit. BR

05-28-2016, 04:20 AM	#30
vinieux Member Posts: 17 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jan 2016 Device: none	SOrry for not updating earlier but I have been travelling a bit and there has been some stress at work. I'm delighted to let you know that I finally identified the culprit and indeed it was Kaspersky. I whitelisted Calibre in Kaspersky (had to get my admin in the office to do it since I do not have admin access), and everything is just fine. The red herring in the entire thing was my attempting to install 64 bit Calibre which I thought was the cause of the issue. Many thanks for your help and apologies to all for the confusion.

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