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Database disk image is malformed

I really like Google Drive. I’ve been using Google Docs for years, and when they modified it to Google Drive, I celebrated. Free syncing, all the features of Docs plus Dropbox… sweet.

One of my coworkers started using it intensely, and over the Christmas break it didn’t sync for two weeks. When he got in, Google Drive just plainly didn’t work. He was getting the error message “database disk image is malformed.” Huh? We tested it on another machine, it worked. Reinstalled Google Drive. Disassociated the account, reassociated it. etc etc. Nothing worked. Even deleted the com.google.drive.plist files in the ~/Library/Preferences folder.

When I was on the phone with Google trying to troubleshoot this problem, We tested and saw that it wasn’t working on the main computer. Tested on another where it worked. I then thought “ZOINKS! It MUST be a file sitting in the users’s ~/Library folder!” So I went into the user folder searched for “Drive” and found some files. There was a com.google.drive file sitting in the ~/Library/Caches folder, and also a folder called “Drive” located in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/. Once I deleted those files, woo hoo! It worked!

1 thought on “Database disk image is malformed”

  1. This was a very useful note to fix my problem. Simple, easy and it worked right away by deleting only the ‘Drive’ folder located in ~/Library/Application Support/Google/.

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