"The specified folder does not exist or was not readable" occasionally appears when Dolphin is restored

rokejulianlockhart · February 18, 2026, 1:46am

Occasionally, dolphin-25.12.2-1.fc43 restores with:

The specified folder does not exist or was not readable.

Any idea of what causes this?

rokejulianlockhart · February 18, 2026, 1:51am

Per forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?p=244687&sid=a:e43521f5457787c3d27ed3c5443c4c12#p244687, I’m quite confident that this is because it attempted to restore a path to a non-automatically-mounted directory. ^[1]

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Prompt to mount a storage device when accessing a path that can deterministically be ascertained to exist on that storage device

in the meantime, if the user is attempting to access a non-existent path inside the distribution’s default storage mounture directory, Dolphin could at least mention in the error message that the path may exist on an unmounted storage device.

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oss-ggr · February 19, 2026, 4:42pm

I have noticed similar errors too. (MX Linux 25.1)
If my NAS is not booted up and I open Dolphin – it will give me an error message.

So, I changed the dolphin settings to open a new window fresh, rather than previously visited folder.