Intellij IDEA can not find tools.jar

Question

I install Intellij IDEA 15.0.2 on Windows 8.1, run it, it asked for the path to jdk, i choose directory with JDK, and then IDEA worked correctly. But after reload of PC, I get this error message from IDEA - 'tools.jar' seems to be not in IDEA classpath..So, I check JAVA_HOME from command line, check for tools.jar in JDK_directory/lib, everything is on their places, how to run IDEA?

Answer 1

Open IDEA. Select [File]-[Invalidate Caches/Restart] menu and select "Invalidate and Restart" button. Have a try. :-)

Answer 2

I think you didn't set up JAVA_HOME. Try to add JAVA_HOME=</path/to/JDK> variable to your PATH. For example JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_66

Answer 3

A few years later, this still persists. I had this issue with java 16 and IntelliJ has it logged here as well. I tried a bunch of things including invalidating the cache and restarting. No luck.

Try Updating IntelliJ as they suggest in the linked website. That did the trick for me. FWIW, I was on IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1 and updated to 2021.2.