I made a custom_symbol library and was saving everything I created to it. then somewhere along the line it began insisting I save things to the native libraries. I dont know why, I always click save as and then point to my library. then it said it don’t have permission. (why bother offering to save it there then?)
So to avoid future problems with libraries. I made a copy of it to MyDocuments\Kicadlib folder(as suggested in the FAQ). went into symbol editor added the path to the copied library (.lib and .dcm) also added an entry to the configure paths to the same folder.
now when I open the schematics I made using the custom symbols it want to recover. I tried that but then its in a recovery library. not that it matters because none of the sybols will load now.
I’ve been at this for 5 hours now. even tried uninstalling Kicad to start fresh. but everything was the same when it reinstalled.
My guess is that by making a copy kicad noticed that there is a possible change to the symbols. So you don’t want to select recover but force kicad to use the symbol in your library.
My first recommendation is to backup your projects before attempting to continue in any way. In that case, at least you won’t make it worse by trying out things you do not entirely understand.
With the link Rene posted you should have enough information to fix your projects.
If you still can’t fix it after that, then try to start with (a copy of) an un-touched project and post exactly what you change and where, and report it here.
Do not post things like:
But instead: I added “c:/MyDocuments/Kicadlib” to: KiCad Project Manager / Preferences / Manage Symbol Libraries / Project Specific Libraries"
Ah, that may well be where your mistake is. If you add a directory (not a library) to KiCad Project Manager / Preferences / Configure Paths / [Plus] Then the only thing you do is create an environment variable that you can use in the other folder paths. In KiCad each library for schematic symbols you want to use MUST be listed in: KiCad Project Manager / Preferences / Manage Symbol Libraries. KiCad does not search for libraries, nor does it use libraries that are not listed there.
Thank you Rene for the link explaining the cache and rescue lib files.
I’ll explain below in case your interested.
the link you sent it led me to figure it out 3 different ways.
editing each symbol that was replaced with a question mark manually was tedious, seemed there had to be a better way.
editing each symbol in the symbol library reference, was faster since it changed every instance of each symbol.
then the best way. I recalled seeing things could be edited using a text editor.
I found one symbol that I corrected manually it looked liked this:
L custom_symbols1:CT U?
this is how it looked while it was broken:
L BegBend-PS-page1-rescue:CT-custom_symbols U?
did a “find and replace all” to make it look like the manually fixed one. when I went to close and re-open I got a cache.lib error and
when I re-opened the schematic all my changes were un-done, so I deleted the cache and recovery.lib’s and then my changes stuck.
apologies: for the vague line you mentioned in my post… also I thought I had a back up before I began this but everything was already messed up. all good now, disaster averted, thanks again