How to recover corrupted Eclipse workspace?

Question

I just managed to corrupt contents of my Eclipse .metadata directory. Starting up with eclipse -clean did not work out. Deleting .metadata and then importing all projects, p

Answer 1

I have succesfully recovered my existing workspace from a totally messed up situation (all kinds of core components giving NPE's and ClassCastExceptions and the like) by using this procedure:

• Open Eclipse
• Close error dialog
• Select first project in the workspace
• Right-click -> Refresh
• Close error dialog
• Close Eclipse
• Close error dialog
• Repeat for all projects in the workspace
• (if your projects are in CVS/SVN etc, synchronize them)
• Clean and rebuild all projects
• Fixed

This whole procedure took me over half an hour for a big workspace, but it did fix it in the end.