Tex File No Longer Found After Previously Working TexMaker & Texlive for Windows 7

Question

I set up TexMaker a while ago, and configured it to use TexLive. I specified all of my paths correctly such that I could generate some nice looking PDFs for a while working on my thesis.

I tried to open my main file the other day (main.tex) when I received the curious error message:

After stating this, the file opens anyway but cannot compile. Using the regular QuickBuild takes too long (it doesn't even finish), so I used the command line instead. Using 'latex main.tex' I receive the following message:

At this point I try and see from a command-line point of view whether the file 'main.tex' is there, so I run a simple 'dir' command:

Which simply shows me that the file is indeed there.

This worked for a while, but now doesn't do anything at all. My MWE would be quite long, however I downloaded the template from this source here.

If I try and compile a test file such as the following, it works fine:

\documentclass{article} \begin{document} This is a test document \end{document}

EDIT: I only have TexLive installed. If I try running pdflatex main.tex I have the following (rather lengthy) response, mainly about reference errors but since I can't use bibtex either I'm not sure what I can do:

Which continues to:

EDIT 2: I've noticed that if I remove /usepackage[version=3]{mhchem} the document compiles again (although without the features of the mhchem package).

Answer 1

Since this question has come up a few times on the TeX.SE without answers, I thought I'd just post my experiences (as a beginner to LaTeX and its corresponding compilation).

It turns out that my issue 'main.tex not found' was purely coincidental to the problems that I was having. In fact, the reason why my file would not compile was due to the fact that I was trying to use mhchem markup in a subtitle heading, which it clearly didn't like.

So for other beginners with similar issues, the error messages are not always entirely helpful, and could indeed lead you down all sorts of false paths in trying to sort it out. It also doesn't help that various error messages come up, which, when you deal with the larger errors, completely disappear as non-issues. My advice is to look at the command line error message where it stops compiling, and ignore any potential error messages above this point.