Preview Cache error keeps persisting

[Cross Aerial Photography]

Hello everyone,

I have looked all over the forums and tried all the solutions but to no avail. The error is ""Lightroom encountered and error when reading from its preview cache and needs to quit"

I have deleted everything but it keeps on giving me this error.

[Per Berntsen]

So what happens after you have deleted the Previews.lrdata folder?

Does Lightroom work for a while, and then give the same error the next time you try to open it?

Or do you get the error immediately after deleting the Previews.lrdata folder?

If it works for a while, there could be something wrong with your hard drive, causing corruption of the previews.

If the error returns immediately, my guess is that you have several catalogs, and are deleting the previews for a different catalog than the one you're trying to open.

[Cross Aerial Photography]

I delete the ones I need to, then sometimes lightroom will work, sometimes I need to restart my PC to get it to work. But no matter what I do, it keeps happening.

[Per Berntsen]

In that case, there is probably something wrong with your hard drive, and you should run a test/diagnostic program on it.

If you haven't already done so, you should immediately back up all important files on this drive.

You can also try moving the catalog to a different drive, and if this fixes the problem, it is a confirmation that your hard drive is failing.

[Cross Aerial Photography]

Do you recommend any specific programs to test?

[Per Berntsen]

I'm not really familiar with any of these programs. but if you search for "check hard drive for errors" or similar on Google, you should get plenty of results.

[Cross Aerial Photography]

I just ran checks on the drive, and it is fine.

[Per Berntsen]

Then I would try to copy the catalog to a different drive, and see how that works out. If you only have one drive and no external drive, see if you can borrow an external drive. If you get no preview cache corruption with an external drive, there is something wrong with your hard drive.

I probably can't help you any further than that - I am no expert on hardware.

But in the nine years I have used Lightroom (on something like five computers), I have never had problems with the preview cache.

I guess I've been lucky.