What should you do if you get an error similar to the below when starting geth?
Fatal: Error starting protocol stack: Access is denied.
Ethereum Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for users of Ethereum, the decentralized application platform and smart contract enabled blockchain. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this communityThis occurs when you have another instance of geth already running.
Use your Operating System's process handler to end the process if there are no visible windows.
This happened to me when I started (and then closed) mist before I had set a private network running.
You can have multiple instances of Geth on different ports using the --port flag, and to solve the error message above, just run all Geth instances with the --ipcdisable flag.
Note: ipcdisable is going to disable IPC communication, which is not required if you are using JSON RPC.