Taking ages to get list of books on device + error communicating with device

[Siavahda]

I accidentally used a USB that didn't come with my kindle, and now Calibre takes 7+ minutes to 'get list of books on device' and then announced 'error communicating with device'. This happened first with the new/wrong USB - after I sent a new book to my kindle - but has continued with the correct cord.

I've already restarted kindle and laptop (Windows 11), and tried deleting the metadata.calibre and driveinfo.calibre files. I do not want to have to factory reset, because I have thousands of books and most of them are covered in notes (and since they're all sideloaded Amazon has no backup of the notes) so I'm desperate for anything else to try!


Error log

calibre, version 7.24.0
ERROR: Error: Error communicating with device

[Errno 22] Invalid argument: 'D:\\metadata.calibre'

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "calibre\gui2\device.py", line 112, in run
File "calibre\gui2\device.py", line 566, in _books
File "calibre\devices\kindle\driver.py", line 459, in books
File "calibre\devices\usbms\driver.py", line 311, in books
File "calibre\devices\usbms\driver.py", line 464, in sync_booklists
File "calibre\devices\usbms\driver.py", line 461, in write_prefix
OSError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument: 'D:\\metadata.calibre'

The new metadata.calibre file being generated has a timestamp from over an hour ago - is this part of the problem? Is there any way to make it generate a correct metadata file?

I'm not very tech-savvy, please explain like I'm a 5yo if you have thoughts/suggestions!

[kovidgoyal]

That error basically means the device filesystem is broken or some program is interfering when calibre tries to access the device. Another thing you can try is rebooting you laptop in safe mode and then running calibre and connecting to the device.

metadata.calibre is regenerated on every connect. Your connect is slow because you deleted it so now its empty and all your thousands of books have to be rescanned.

[Siavahda]

I'll try safemode, thank you. And cross my fingers hard!

[kovidgoyal]

Also try run chkdsk or similar on the kindle drive. I havent kept up with the state fo windows disk checking tools but presumably some disk checking software does still exist.

[kovidgoyal]

Oh and incase you havent thought of this already try a different USB port as well

[Siavahda]

I ended up factory resetting, but thank you for the help