RedNotebook will not open and fully start

[Teresa]

RedNotebook begins to open as expected, then unexpectedly closes before fulling starting within 3 seconds. I'm using version 2.8 on a Dell laptop running Windows 10 Home edition. Reinstalling does not fix the problem.

Program was running fine yesterday. After a hard shut down, the program will not open now. I've reinstalled the program, tried doing a system restore and it still will not work. I am not a programmer and cannot figure out where to get help with the problem. I love this program and feel lost without access to it.

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

I recommend to back up the journal first. The data can be found under C:\Users\<username>\.rednotebook. The first thing to do is to inspect the rednotebook.log file in that folder and paste its contents here on launchpad.

Then I would inspect the last month file, i.e., data/2020-11.txt and check whether its contents look odd. If you see nothing obvious, try moving the file out of the "data" directory and try to start RedNotebook. If RedNotebook starts now, the problem is in the last month file, i.e., it may have become corrupted and needs to be fixed manually with a text editor or you can copy-paste its contents into RedNotebook.

[Teresa (tampateresa)]

Thank you for the info. I'm not sure how to back up the data is the program won't open. However, this is the info in the log file:

2020-11-28 08:58:55,684 INFO Writing log to file "C:\Users\dj\.rednotebook\rednotebook.log"
2020-11-28 08:58:55,684 INFO System encoding: mbcs
2020-11-28 08:58:55,684 INFO Language code: en_US
2020-11-28 08:59:07,750 INFO chardet not found. 'utf-8' encoding will be assumed
2020-11-28 08:59:07,822 INFO Running in portable mode: False
2020-11-28 08:59:07,822 INFO First Start: False
2020-11-28 08:59:07,822 INFO RedNotebook version: 1.15
2020-11-28 08:59:07,854 INFO System info: machine: AMD64, platform: Windows-8.1-6.3.9600, processor: Intel64 Family 6 Model 58 Stepping 9, GenuineIntel, python_version: 2.7.12, release: 8.1, system: Windows, GTK version: (2, 24, 10), PyGTK version: (2, 24, 0), Yaml version: 3.10
2020-11-28 08:59:12,993 DEBUG Default font: Sans 10
2020-11-28 08:59:12,993 DEBUG Default size: 10
2020-11-28 08:59:13,759 INFO Cloud ignore list: [u'#tags', u'and', u'comma', u'filter', u'separated', u'these', u'words']
2020-11-28 08:59:13,759 INFO Cloud include list: [u'job', u'mtv', u'play', u'spam', u'work']
2020-11-28 08:59:13,759 DEBUG Start compiling regexes
2020-11-28 08:59:13,759 DEBUG Finished
2020-11-28 08:59:14,088 DEBUG Tray icon visible: False
2020-11-28 08:59:14,104 INFO Opening journal at u'C:\\Users\\dj\\Documents\\Health\\Mental Health\\2015 Journal\\new'
2020-11-28 08:59:14,104 DEBUG Starting to load files in dir "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new"
2020-11-28 08:59:15,213 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-01.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:15,244 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-02.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:15,276 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-03.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:18,384 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-04.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:19,088 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-05.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:31,651 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-06.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:32,058 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-07.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:34,510 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-08.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:37,308 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-09.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:37,371 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-10.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:37,417 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-11.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:37,808 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2015-12.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:37,948 DEBUG Loading file "C:\Users\dj\Documents\Health\Mental Health\2015 Journal\new\2016-01.txt"
2020-11-28 08:59:38,183 ...

[Teresa (tampateresa)]

Thank you so much for the help. After I sent you the log file details I saw the line that said there was an illegal character, position 0 and went to the data file. It opened in word pad, but there was nothing visible. With a select all, a bunch of invisible stuff was highlighted and locked up word when I tried to copy/paste the data I couldn't see, to see it. I deleted the first character in the txt file, saved and RedNotebook finally opened. However, I lost the entire month of entries for November. The upside is that the previous six years data was still there.

[Jendrik Seipp (jendrikseipp)]

Thanks for the log. The last month file seems to be corrupted. I recommend to open the files with a text editor and salvage the stored text by copy-pasting it into RedNotebook.