You are here

pFF won't load

15 posts / 0 new
Last post
daenyth
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 8 months ago
Joined: 2006-01-06 15:33
pFF won't load

i've had this before, i run the launcher program, and firefox won't load. or, more accurately, when i check the task manager the process is running, but without a window. last time i had no clue why and eventually had to reinstall it to get it working again. this time it happened right after firefox crashed, so i think thats why it happened. im trying a few differant things right now, but does anyone know a way to fix this?

John T. Haller
John T. Haller's picture
Online
Last seen: 20 min 48 sec ago
AdminDeveloperModeratorTranslator
Joined: 2005-11-28 22:21
Corrupt Profile

If it's after a crash, chances are your profile is corrupt. the same thing can happen to regular FF. You'll probably need to create a new profile and then add in the pieces of the old one that aren't corrupt (bookmarks.html, cookies.txt, cert8.db, key3.db, secmod.db, localstore.rdf)

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

daenyth
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 8 months ago
Joined: 2006-01-06 15:33
thanks for the info, but im

thanks for the info, but im not sure how do i do that? ive only ever used a single profile with ff, and even then i thought you needed to run ff to create another one.

John T. Haller
John T. Haller's picture
Online
Last seen: 20 min 48 sec ago
AdminDeveloperModeratorTranslator
Joined: 2005-11-28 22:21
Explanation

This article may help a little:
http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/09/15/2043254&tid=132&ti...

Your profile is in PortableFirefox\profile. If you backed it up, you can restore it. Otherwise, copy that whole directory somewhere else and then delete the original. Start PFF. A new profile will be created. Then close PFF and copy the files I mention above from the copy you just made back to PortableFirefox\profile.

If you're not as geeky, it may help to have a geek help you with it.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

daenyth
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 8 months ago
Joined: 2006-01-06 15:33
lol thank you. believe me,

lol thank you. believe me, im quite geeky, but i havent seen the need to do anything with profiles in ff before. ill definately back it up next time

JeffInPA (not verified)
Won't load even from a new profile

I've searched through the forums for problems similar to mine, but I haven't found a solution. I hope I haven't just missed it.

I can run PFF from the hard drive, but when I copy the entire (original, unzipped) Portable Firefox 1.5 directory to my SanDisk Cruzer Micro (512 MB USB 2.0) flash drive, it doesn't seem to run. I haven't had a crash, and I haven't added any extensions (yet). When I click the launcher, I get the splash screen pretty quickly. When the splash screen goes away, after maybe 30 seconds, nothing seems to happen; the program never opens. Opening the task manager, though, I see that PFF is consuming 97+% of my CPU resources (but only 4 MB of RAM, which seems low).

The drive works fine because I can read/write other files, but I tried a couple different USB ports on my computer just to see. No dice.

Any suggestions?

FWIW, I have a 2.7 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM, XP Home w/ SP2, and USB 2.0 ports. I have nothing else running (well, other than firewall and virus software, but they don't seem to complain when I run from the HD) when I've tried PFF from the flash drive.

Thanks,

Jeff

(BTW, Portable Thunderbird works great.)

John T. Haller
John T. Haller's picture
Online
Last seen: 20 min 48 sec ago
AdminDeveloperModeratorTranslator
Joined: 2005-11-28 22:21
It's something with the drive

or the directory structure you are copying it to. What directory are you putting it in?

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

JeffInPA (not verified)
It's in the root

I dragged the PortableFirefox directory that was in the zip file right to the root of my flash drive. All subdirectories were left intact (i.e., they were not moved or renamed).

I wondered myself if it might be a drive problem, but the drive seems to behave normally otherwise. For example, I can read/write to it as expected, and as I noted above, PortableThunderbird works perfectly. Is it possible that the drive wouldn't like PFF (or vice versa) for some reason but would still run PTB properly?

John T. Haller
John T. Haller's picture
Online
Last seen: 20 min 48 sec ago
AdminDeveloperModeratorTranslator
Joined: 2005-11-28 22:21
It's the drive

or your connection to it. There's no other explanation. Try removing everything and reformatting it. Otherwise, you're out of luck with that drive. If it works on your local PC hard drive and your directory structure is PortableFirefox off the root, it is ABSOLUTELY an issue with your drive or your connectivity to it (permissions, etc).

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

JeffInPA (not verified)
When in doubt, start all over

In another thread, it was suggested that doing a clean install of PFF should be tried if nothing else works. Just to be sure, I followed your advice about reformatting the drive, first. The combination seemed to do the trick.

ds (not verified)
FAT32 > NTFS

I had the same problem as mentioned in this thread: Firefox didn't start after splash screen. Nothing seemed to work instead of formatting the USB drive as NTFS instead of FAT32. Now it works fine..

Regards from Berlin and thanks for your good job, John!
_Dirk
http://www.decaf.de

daenyth
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 8 months ago
Joined: 2006-01-06 15:33
hmm

its stopped working again and im wondering why. i renamed my profile folder to something else so it wouldnt see it, and then it ran as normal, and created a new profile folder. i started installing all my extensions again, and for some reason now that i've done that it won't run at all. i had the xpi files on my thumb drive, and i opened them in the firefox file menu. works up till that point, but once i reload my extensions it breaks. all of them are from the mozilla site, nothing unsupported. anyone know why?

John T. Haller
John T. Haller's picture
Online
Last seen: 20 min 48 sec ago
AdminDeveloperModeratorTranslator
Joined: 2005-11-28 22:21
Enumerating

your extensions would help. From what you described, I'm 99% sure it's an extension. Any extension that hard codes a path in prefs.js or in its own config files -- neither of which is a good idea -- will fail.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

daenyth
Offline
Last seen: 17 years 8 months ago
Joined: 2006-01-06 15:33
found it

i played around with backups and installed them one by one. it was customize google. which is odd because i could have sworn i had it before, without breaking. but thats when it stopped loading when i installed them one by one. i can make a list of all the extensions im trying to install

John T. Haller
John T. Haller's picture
Online
Last seen: 20 min 48 sec ago
AdminDeveloperModeratorTranslator
Joined: 2005-11-28 22:21
Odd

I had Customize Google working just fine when I tested it like a month ago.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Topic locked