I've been using PFF for a while now and absolutely love it. My configuration is a 4gb usb flashdrive that I use at home and work (Both WinXP). Today when I started PFF the default page was the 'first run' page you see when you first install.
The toolbar was reset, I lost my bookmarks and stored passwords. I had backed up my key a few weeks ago and I copied the profile directory from the backup over the profile directory on the usb key. I opened PFF and it still don't have my customized toolbars, bookmarks or passwords. The extensions are still listed and seem to work (on the right side of the status bar I still have the links to the Lola and VideoDownloader extensions).
After some google searches I found that the passwords are stored in a signons2.txt file. I checked the file and I can see all the sites and hashes I had before, but when I check under tools and hit the 'show passwords' button, there are no sites there, I just get a blank window.
The bookmarks are similar. The bookmarks.html file is only 25k and doesn't have anything but the basics, but there is a couple bookmarks-#.html files that are over 1000k and have all the bookmarks I'm looking for.
I have no idea what triggered the change, it was working fine when I last used it. But for now my PFF is stuck somewhere between new-install and last-configuration.
Anyone have any suggestions for me?
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one bookmark-#.html to bookmarks.html, that will fix it.
But I don't know what triggered the change.
About passwords, it happened to me after an portable update but I just ignore it ad restart collecting passwords...
If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report
I have a couple backups of my profile directory from the past few months, and a full backup of everything on the flashdrive from December.
I copied my firefox directory to test directory so I can try some things out and not do more damage and I also installed a fresh copy of firefox in another directory to make sure I'm not dealing with an existing problem.
I tried to copy the signons2.txt and the key3.db files from each of my backups into the profile directory of each of my test instances. Each time I was getting a blank listing when I clicked 'show passwords'.
I made a copy of the December backup and put the signons2.txt from my most recent backup into that directory (leaving the key3.db intact) and I was able to see all my sites and passwords. I'm going to install the password extension so I can export the passwords so I don't lose them again. (This is a huge relief! I have an abundance of passwords stored and many of them I didn't record anywhere else) Why it worked with the mis-match of files I have no idea, I'm just very happy it did.
As far as the bookmarks, I did rename one of the other bookmarks files to bookmarks.html and it has most of my bookmarks. I'm missing some items, I'm guessing it's about a month old. I'll keep playing with it.
With the restoration of the bookmarks, some of my items on my links toolbar have returned. So I'm assuming once I find a more current bookmarks file I can get my links toolbar a little more to what I was used to.
The only missing piece is the customized toolbars, but that can be redone to what it was before with some minor tweaking.
I just saw a directory in the profile, I'm not sure if it's there by default or is there from one of the plug-ins I use, but the path is:
FirefoxPortable\Data\profile\bookmarkbackups
The file dated today was only 25k, but the file from yesterday was 325k. I copied that into the profile directory and renamed it bookmarks.html and now everything looks current.
The format of the filename was different then the backups in the profile directory itself, this one was named 'bookmarks-2008-03-05.html'
My theory is that FF reinitializes things if the files get messed up. So the next question is how would things get messed up?
Well, you can use your imagination, including things like a messed up file system, power glitches, shutting down the computer before the launcher has had time to clean up, etc.
But I guess the real issue is, how to recover. The old CHKDSK /f is a good thing to do -- won't hurt, and can actually fix errors that aren't otherwise apparent.
But the main thing that can be helpful is having a backup.
MC