diff --git a/toolkit.py b/toolkit.py
index b224fed583c33893a4be61b712d08676f5442309..be90cc62c13bd99b7da8c37c78e773c41187b6d9 100755
--- a/toolkit.py
+++ b/toolkit.py
@@ -409,7 +409,7 @@ class ClassificationProject(object):
             # if those don't exist, we need to load them from ROOT trees first
             self._load_from_hdf5(*self.dataset_names_tree)
 
-        except KeyError:
+        except (KeyError, IOError):
 
             logger.info("Couldn't load all datasets - reading from ROOT trees")