I've seen 3 other fixes so far:
The solution boils down to cleaning up the .metadata folder.
Another possible cause of the “Workspace in use or cannot be created, chose a different one” issue is that the real path to your workspace may have changed.
In my case, the real location of the workspace had changed, but I had used a symlink to make it look like it was in the same location. I saw errors in logs indicating that eclipse was looking at the previous "real" location, as opposed to following the symlink, and this was causing the errors.
In my case, I just moved the workspace back to its old location.
There is another case where the path to the workspace may not exist, e.g., if you have imported preferences from another workspace, then some imported workspace addresses may appear in your "open workspace" dialog; then if you didn't pay attention to those addresses, you would get the exact same error once you tried to open them.
Running eclipse in Administrator Mode fixed it for me. You can do this by [Right Click] -> Run as Administrator on the eclipse.exe from your install dir.
I was on a working environment with win7 machine having restrictive permission. I also did remove the .lock and .log files but that did not help. It can be a combination of all as well that made it work.
Another possible case if none works is to see that there is a running Java application . may be your previous open and close has left unkilled java instances.
Do look for any java instance is running if there are two at least you need to kill one.But ,most of the time i kill any java running :) because that java is using the work space earlier and still will if don't kill it.
Change another work space in case if you want a multiple IDE to use and work on diffrent or same project , but you should import project form workspace after you open your IDE.
i was faced this issue when ever the eclipse is not closed (kill eclipse process the from task manager or computer power off), i was tried below steps, it worked for me.
1) Remove the file names start with ".fileTable" from this folder
C:\eclipse\configuration\org.eclipse.osgi.manager
2) Remove the log files like text files start with numeric names from this folder
C:\eclipse\configuration
3) Open Command prompt(cmd) navigate to this folder
C:\eclipse
type below command
eclipse clean start
Start Eclipse with the option -Dosgi.locking=none.
I got the trick here and it works.
Don't do this unless you know nobody can work on the same file at the same time.
Another all-too-common reason for this problem is if you attempt to load a directory on a drive that is no longer connected. For example, Say you program in C:\Code\Java, but occasionally work off of a flash drive, H:\Code\Java. If you do not have the drive connected it can be easy to believe you are trying to load a valid directory without noticing your typo.
Here are a few steps to solve it the no. 4 step is works for me.
Choosing a "different one" is actually a pretty easy solution.
I had been running Eclipse as an administrator (sudo eclipse from the command line) because the "workspace" folder was throwing the Workspace in use or cannot be created… error (and running as administrator seemed to be the only solution that fixed it).
A coworker (working on this same issue with me) wanted to run Eclipse by clicking on an icon. So when he ran Eclipse, and the dialogue box came up with the choose your workspace, he just added a "2" to the end of "workspace".
This created a new folder: "workspace2". Eclipse ran fine with that; and I haven’t had any of the locking problems since.
I don't know what's the wrong but I solved by creating a directory directly in c drive(c:\dev) instead of from my home folder (c:\users\me\dev). But I don't have to thinks about it. In my case, it is fresh eclipse unziped instance. I am not able to see .matadata folder in eclipse folder. By God grace, I solved.
The reason this was happening to me (with Photon) was easily fixed by changing an Eclipse general preference:
Window -> Preferences -> General: Uncheck: "Always run in background"
Once you make that change, whenever you shutdown Eclipse, it will no longer leave the javaw.exe process running in the background. I’m guessing this is a bug in Photon (or a bug with using the Amazon Corretto OpenJDK version of Java with Eclipse) that will one day be fixed.
I faced the same problem, but for some reasons the .lock file in workspace was not getting deleted. Even creating a new workspace was also getting locked.
So what I did was cleaning the windows temp folder, the %PREFETCH% folder and %TEMP% locations. Restart the system and then it allowed to delete the .lock file.
Maybe it will help someone.
