A JRE or JDK must be available in order to run Eclipse. No JVM was found after searching the following locations

Question

Eclipse is unable to open, have used eclipse before and has open before without a problem. Now I keep getting the following error message:

A Java Runt

Answer 1

It usually is because:

• you indicated the wrong jvm path in your -vm argument: see this SO question for an concrete example.
• the eclipse.ini got corrupted somehow (if it hasn't been modified, this isn't it, but if setting a jvm path doesn't work, ... I would replace the eclipse.ini by one coming from a fresh installation just to be sure)
• the java which eclipse search by default is no longer accessible (because the $PATH is no longer up-to-date)

More details on the wiki page "Finding a VM, Using JNI Invocation or Executing Java"

No -vm specified

When no -vm is specified, the launcher looks for a virtual machine first in a jre directory in the root of eclipse and then on the search path.
If java is found in either location, then we look for a jvm shared library (jvm.dll on window, libjvm.so on *nix platforms) relative to that java executable.

• If a jvm shared library is found we load it and use the JNI invocation api to start the vm.
• If no jvm shared library is found, we exec the java launcher to start the vm in a new process.

As mentioned in "FAQ How do I run Eclipse?":

Eclipse DOES NOT consult the JAVA_HOME environment variable.

So I would check your $PATH, starting by n new shell sesion (whatever your OS is), typing 'java -version' to see if it still returns anything.