On a Win7 Box
- USB thumb drive
- download and install Portable Apps Platform (1.6.1)
- downloaded and installed newest version of Thunderbird Portable (3.1.7. rev2)
- Configured my email accounts(imap) using the Win7 machine and accessed my mail.
- All portable apps work fine including TB portable.
On a Win XP
- Take same USB drive to XP SP2 box
- Startup Portable Apps Menu - works fine.
- Try starting TB portable. Will not open email and email accounts.
- Other portable apps work on XP.
Take USB drive back to Win7 machine
- Startup Portable Apps Menu - works fine.
- Try starting TB portable. Will run, but all email and email account config is gone.
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This is probably an NTFS permissions issues. NTFS was not designed for removable media and has issues with security settings by default. To counteract them, right click on the drive (on your Windows 7 machine) and select Properties. Select the Security tab. Select Edit. If the user called 'Everyone' isn't there, add them. Then select them and set it to Full Control. Click OK/Apply to close all windows. That should get applied to the whole drive and should fix the issue.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
MY USB stick is formatted as FAT32. Is that my issue? I guess it never occurred to me to check what type of file-system the USB drive had on it. Should I be formmating this as NTFS, performing your steps above and then trying again?
BTW -
a) Love your work with the whole Portable Apps tools and suite
b) It's extremely refreshing to get a sensible and quick response to a question. Kudos and thanks again.
your disk should have fat32, if it had ntfs, it could cause problems unless the security bits are removed.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
I just tried the same as you and all works fine.
However: the file prefs.js is sometimes acting crazy. I had some experince recently too, where this file became corrupt and then all seemed to get lost somehow.
Recovery is sometimes difficult.
I did then run checkdisk, this did recover in fact the prefs.js and from there al was fine again.
Or do you have ntfs on your usb stick?
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland