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

In my case, it was not the workspace that was broken but Eclipse itself. Even though it seemed like workspace is broken (the same error dialog, etc.), all I had to do was reinstall Eclipse and point it to the old workspace. You can't really repair a broken workspace if it is the workspace that is broken but you can do so just for good measure, maybe it'll work.