New Problem: IOError [Errno12] Not Enough Space

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

... mine is almost pure vanilla.

mine is more like a knickerbocker glory sundae, with extra nuts.

BR

[deback]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Post the full error message. It sounds like whatever drive you have the calibre temporary directory on is running out of space.

Thanks, but that was the first thing I checked (how much free space the drive had...). The error message is long gone (except what I posted in the subject). Let me know if there is a log file somewhere that I could post for you here.

In the last few months, I've experimented with having my library on three different drives (at different times, of course) -- C:, D: and F: (an external drive) -- The current free space (and at the time of the crashes) on those drives is: 165 gigs, 95 gigs, and 448 gigs, so this problem has nothing to do with running out of space on any of the hard drives I've used.

It seems to me that Calibre will crash when it runs out of memory while performing functions on many files within the (merged) file I'm editing. I recently added a second 8GB RAM chip to see if that would solve the Calibre crashing problem, but it has made no difference.

Calibre just crashed again a few minutes ago while I was saving a 17MB file that has 43 epub files merged into it (crashed while saving the file). The "edit book" window just disappeared (which is a problem that happens frequently), but the Calibre window was still there. (The "not enough space" crash problem has only occurred twice.)

Calibre will crash more often when editing a large file in which many files have been merged -- either when saving the file or when checking the book or when automatically fixing all errors with Check Book, and sometimes, when doing other functions (unless I've restarted the computer recently, then it works fine for a few hours before it becomes unstable again). I get the "Not Responding" text at the top of the Calibre window all the time when doing these type of functions. Then the "Not Responding" text will disappear and the function will end successfully...but once in a while, the "edit book" window will just disappear, and then I'll have to redo everything I've done since I last saved the file.

I'm currently using v3.7 after recently upgrading from 3.8 to 3.9, back to 3.8, and back to 3.7. I can't recall when this problem began, but it was probably when I started merging epub files (using the epubmerge plugin) in order to make many omnibuses of books by certain authors--about two months ago.

I love this program so much, use it all day every day (recently, that is), and even sent you a donation the other day, since I had put it off for way too long. Thank you, Kovid!

[kovidgoyal]

Click the show details on the error message popup and post the full error. And remeber that this is space in whatever drive has the temporary directory which may or may not be your main disk.

[deback]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Click the show details on the error message popup and post the full error. And remeber that this is space in whatever drive has the temporary directory which may or may not be your main disk.

Yea, thanks, but I know how to show the details. This "not enough space" error happened a couple of days ago, so I no longer have access to open that popup. The temp directory was on the C: drive in the default users temp directory (I changed the temp dirs yesterday to c:\calibre_cache\cache\ and c:\calibre_cache\temp\), and the C: drive still has 165 gigs of free space. The problem has nothing to do with not enough space on the hard drive. It has to do with not enough memory to finish the operation I was doing. I believe there is a problem with how Calibre handles memory and releases memory.

I've had these memory type of problems with Calibre off and on for a long time. Even two years ago, when I was spending about 16 hours every day editing regular-sized books (for example: editing and reformatting books borrowed from Open Library), the "edit book" window would suddenly disappear sometimes, so I got in the habit of saving the file every minute or so--because one time I had forgotten to save the file for about an hour and had tons of edits to do over.

I've also learned that when Calibre crashes, I need to manually delete the temp files in the temp directory. A week or more ago, Calibre became very slow. It was taking about 5 minutes to save a 61MB file and a long time to do any function (beautify, smarten, check book, remove unused CSS rules, etc). I finally discovered tons of old calibre temp files in the default temp folders (due to all the crashes I've had since I last installed Calibre), so I deleted them and that took a long time. After that, Calibre is back to operating like it should and is no longer slow (except I'm still having crashes where the Edit Book window suddenly disappears).

Anyway, I think I'll upgrade to 3.9 today and try that again. I'll post here if anything happens that shouldn't happen.

[deback]

Originally Posted by deback

Anyway, I think I'll upgrade to 3.9 today and try that again. I'll post here if anything happens that shouldn't happen.

Except now I'm having a problem with Windows Installer and getting an error (2503 and 2502), so I can't uninstall or install Calibre (or any other program). Now I get to research that problem and get it fixed. I already tried the msixec unregister and register commands, which didn't solve the problem.

[BetterRed]

@deback - file explorer crashing, calibre editor crashing, and now windows installer not working. Makes me wonder if there's a common cause.

Have you run a system file check. if sfc /scannow is clean, then I would think its most likely a rogue startup program or shell extension.

BR

[deback]

Yes, I ran SFC. No problems found, which is normal whenever I run it. I don't think SFC has ever found any problems...maybe once.

File Explorer has been crashing off and on (blank white window when opened) for a long time...since Windows 8.1 was installed.

Calibre has had a problem since mid-2015, when I started editing epub files. Before that, I just used it to convert files, add cover images, etc.

Windows Installer started having a problem about a week or so ago. The reason is explained in the next paragraph. The three problems aren't related, as far as I know.

After I ran SFC, I did a system restore to fix the "installer" problem I've been having--long story on why that happened and it's not related to Calibre--Has to do with my aborting the installation of MacroMaker when it was installing itself on October 13th after I restarted the computer and had no idea what was installing, so I clicked cancel. The Windows Installer has been messed up since then. I still don't know why MacroMaker was doing an installation, since it's an older program and there have been no updates since 2008, I think--and I had installed it a couple weeks before that happened. I installed it because an old version of Keyboard Express that I've used since the 90s quit working on this computer. I've had to open MacroMaker manually after restarting since that incident on the 13th. The file in the startup folder is the regular .exe file and not the .msi installation file.

Anyway, the System Restore failed (I chose the restore point at where MacroMaker was removed, which is something I did--uninstalled Macromaker--after I aborted the MacroMaker "automatic" installation, because I thought reinstalling it would fix everything, which it didn't...Windows Installer wouldn't let me reinstall it, but it's still working...it just won't load from the Startup folder...I love having problems because then I get to research and fix them).

The system restore failure seems to have something to do with the WindowsApps folder, and I found the instructions on how to rename it (go to recovery to command prompt and rename it, etc). So, now I'm at the point where I will try the system restore again. I can't wait to get back to Calibre!

[BetterRed]

@deback - assuming it still doesn't work, all I can suggest is one of these ==>> In-place Upgrade/Repair - Windows 10

I've used the Windows 7 version of that process several times to 'fix' badly broken Windows systems. Takes a while (I'd set aside 2 days), mainly to download and apply all the updates since the ISO was created, but with one or two exceptions (IIRC, a browser and a printer) all the 3rd party programs and their settings were preserved.

BR

[deback]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@deback - assuming it still doesn't work, all I can suggest is one of these ==>> In-place Upgrade/Repair - Windows 10

I've used the Windows 7 version of that process several times to 'fix' badly broken Windows systems. Takes a while (I'd set aside 2 days), mainly to download and apply all the updates since the ISO was created, but with one or two exceptions (IIRC, a browser and a printer) all the 3rd party programs and their settings were preserved.

BR

System Restore was successful! BUT the installer problem still exists (and MacroMaker didn't load, like it should from the Startup folder). Tried to uninstall Calibre 3.7 and got the same error 2503 and 2502 message. So, I will try the restore point from 10/13 before a critical Windows update that installed a bunch of drivers. The restore point I just tried was on 10/17, which wasn't far enough back. There are no more restore points before 10/13. I had already decided that I would do a Repair installation if System Restore doesn't work.

I never used Windows 7...went from 3 to SE to XP to 8.1 and then to 10, but I've gone through my share of computer frustrations since I bought my first PC in 1989, that's for sure. After that, I started building and upgrading my computers, instead of buying canned computers. I have a USB drive that has the repair setup files on it, and I'll use that for the repair install, if I end up having to do doing that. I just don't want to have to reinstall all my programs.

Thanks for the URL. I was just reading a page similar to that while waiting for the Restore to finish.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by deback

I just don't want to have to reinstall all my programs.

The link I gave you is a process that avoids precisely that issue

Originally Posted by BetterRed

[. . .] but with one or two exceptions (IIRC, a browser and a printer) all the 3rd party programs and their settings were preserved.

That includes old apps, Photoshop, Autocad, Office, Games etc -

BR

[deback]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

The link I gave you is a process that avoids precisely that issue



That includes old apps, Photoshop, Autocad, Office, Games etc -

BR

Right, I've been aware of the repair installation for years and knew that you don't have to reinstall everything. I think I knew I would be having to do this about two or three weeks ago when I put the Windows 10 Media Installation files on a USB drive. So, I'm getting ready to do that next (tonight).

[deback]

Correction: It wasn't two or three weeks ago, but it was on August 27th that I made the USB installation drive to do a repair install. I'm redoing the drive now, in hopes that I'll have the right build to do the repair install. It says if you don't have the same or newer build, the repair will fail (and I'm getting tired of failures...) It would probably work okay, but I want to be sure.

[deback]

I'm back! It took a long time...over 2.5 hours, but at one point, I found out that if I turned off Windows Firewall, it would go faster. Within 2 seconds after I did that, the procedure that was checking my system to see if I could do the installation (near the beginning of the installation) immediately went to the next phase--this happened after about 40 minutes of waiting for that phase to be done.

One thing I've checked so far that is working again: When I click the Win key and type Settings, the Settings actually opens when I hit the Enter key. It didn't before. I've remembered other problems I've had that I didn't mention here.

I wanted to mention one more thing about Calibre that I also remembered. When I finish creating a merged epub file (or any epub file), I will copy it to my laptop, so I can add it to ADE, which is how I read books. Quite often, after using Calibre for many hours, I will get the message "not enough memory," and that's one reason why I think there is a memory release problem with Calibre. When this happens, I almost always have to restart the computer in order to copy the file to the laptop. It's possible that closing Explorer and reopening it (in the Task Manager) will allow me to copy the file, but I can't remember.

I now have the Creators Edition of Windows 10.

[deback]

I just uninstalled Calibre 3.7 and installed 3.9. It was all quick, and all my settings are still in 3.9 without having to import them. Yea!

[deback]

Calibre 3.9 was working fine for an hour or so, until after I ran Check Book and fixed some errors manually. Then I had the software automatically fix the remaining 89 errors under Check Book (89 mimetype errors in content.opf). After an hour or more of waiting and looking at "Running checks, please wait" without completing the task, I finally realized I could click on Check Book again, so I did that and received this error message (I actually had received that error msg when I first clicked on fix errors but was too tired to deal with it...and it looked like it was still working, so I just kept waiting).

calibre, version 3.9.0
ERROR: Unhandled exception: <b>error</b>:can't start new thread

calibre 3.9 embedded-python: True is64bit: False
Windows-10-10.0.16299-SP0 Windows ('32bit', 'WindowsPE')
('Windows', '10', '10.0.16299')
Python 2.7.12+
Windows: ('10', '10.0.16299', 'SP0', u'Multiprocessor Free')
Interface language: None
Successfully initialized third party plugins: DeDRM (6, 5, 4) && EpubSplit (2, 2, 1) && Find Duplicates (1, 6, 3) && EpubMerge (2, 1, 1)
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\tweak_book\boss.py", line 71, in ans
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\tweak_book\boss.py", line 1242, in check_requested
File "site-packages\calibre\gui2\tweak_book\check.py", line 210, in run_checks
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\oeb\polish\check\main.py", line 44, in run_checks
File "site-packages\calibre\ebooks\oeb\polish\check\base.py", line 50, in run_checkers
File "multiprocessing\pool.py", line 727, in __init__
File "multiprocessing\pool.py", line 159, in __init__
File "multiprocessing\pool.py", line 223, in _repopulate_pool
File "multiprocessing\dummy\__init__.py", line 75, in start
File "threading.py", line 736, in start
error: can't start new thread

Then I exited without saving and received the same error message as above. The program closed out, and now I'm going to try again with 3.9.