While setting up Eclipse on my development station in order to compare it to NetBeans I encountered the following error:

A Java Runtime Environment (JRE) or Java Development Kit (JDK) must be available in order to run Eclipse. No Java virtual machine was found after searching the following locations: c:\Program Files\Eclipse\jre\bin\javaw.exe 'javaw.exe' in your current path

I have Java installed, and it is working properly. It was a big pain to get working properly the first time with NetBeans so I was worried that if I tweaked it to work with Eclipse I may end up with it not working in either. I took a peek into many of the config files for Eclipse and didn’t see an option to set the path for javaw.exe, so I made use of my Google-Fu skills and found the following solution:

Right Click Eclipse.exe and select Create Shortcut

Right Click the new shortcut and select Properties

At the end of the target path, add the parameter -vm and then the path to your javaw.exe

ie: “C:\Program Files\eclipse\eclipse.exe” -vm C:\Java\jdk1.6.0_13\bin

and then the path to your javaw.exe ie: “C:\Program Files\eclipse\eclipse.exe” -vm C:\Java\jdk1.6.0_13\bin Hit Ok, then run Eclipse from your new shortcut

Problem solved!