I recently upgraded to Kicad 5 from Kicad 4.07. I’ve worked with a few of my old projects with no problems. When I open the schematic I get the message that I need to remap symbols. After I do that everything seems to work fine. I recently pulled down an old project of mine: https://github.com/nlbutts/LaserBodyRoll
I’ve never checked in anything other the the .pro, .sch, and .pcb files. I was not aware that the cache files were important. After reading this post (Project not finding components in library), I realized my mistake. Am I just screwed? Do I need to re-create my schematic from memory? Or is there a way to cover and remap symbols?
There was a significant upgrade to the organization of the libraries going from v4 to v5. Unfortunately, the upgrade process doesn’t touch user settings (where the map(s) to the standard libraries are). Thus your install is pointing to the v4 library structure which was removed and replaced with the v5 library structure. Please see this FAQ entry for more details and to help you navigate the manual portion of the upgrade.
You may also want to review this FAQ entry about remapping projects started in v4 to being able to be used in v5. Note, this is a one-way process, keep a backup (a zip archive of the project file should be sufficient) of your v4 project just in case of problems upgrading (so you can return to step 1 if necessary).
I did see those FAQs. What I don’t understand is when the rescue operation ran, I got an error message for every component on my schematic. I did update the paths to the V5 libraries, then I was able to manually change R, C and Ls to point to the new library. I’m now working on a regex the schematic to remap ALL R, C, and Ls. Then I will tackle the ICs.
I don’t understand why the remap operation didn’t work on this design, but it did work on other designs.
This is explained in the remap FAQ article. (second link in the answer by @SembazuruCDE ) I mention in it that the version 5 lib is organized differently to the version 4 lib. Which means that there can not be an automatic mapping from symbols of an old project to the version 5 library. (I propose two different solutions for this. Option 1 is to setup the version 4 library before remapping. Option 2 is to let the rescue dialog take over. Option 2 requires a valid cache lib so if that one is damaged then you need to go with Option 1.)
After remap, if you have issue with the library names you can either use KiCad tool for update and each symbol to link to the correct lib again, or you can export the schematic into csv BOM which symbol lib info. Then you can to fix using excel software to work on CSV BOM file, and run my script below: