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Firefox & Thunderbird installed on D drive which died. Reinstallation on C drive - 'profile cant be found', both programs

gary-a
gary-a
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I had Firefox and Thunderbird installed the D drive. The D drive died. I try to reinstall on the C drive and it installs but when run says that the profile is not available (same for both programs). I have deleted all reference to mozilla in user>appdata and the same happens. Tried running "firefox -p", with the same resulting message. Back to Opera?

I had Firefox and Thunderbird installed the D drive. The D drive died. I try to reinstall on the C drive and it installs but when run says that the profile is not available (same for both programs). I have deleted all reference to mozilla in user>appdata and the same happens. Tried running "firefox -p", with the same resulting message. Back to Opera?

All Replies (5)

TyDraniu
TyDraniu
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Try to find %Appdata\Roaming\Mozilla\profiles.ini file and check references to your profile. If you've deleted the profile, you can delete the profiles.ini eventually.

gary-a
gary-a Question owner
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Thanks, but I said I'd done that. It is a fix already in the forum files. After doing that (searching AppData) I actually searched the entire C drive for profiles.ini and ... not there. I think it must be some registry entry? Does someone who writes Mozilla stuff not scour these issues?

jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
jscher2000 - Support Volunteer
  • Top 10 Contributor
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I've always used the default location for my profiles, so I don't know whether there is a registry key associated with non-default locations. If you are familiar with RegEdit.exe you could check keys such as:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\mozilla.org

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Mozilla HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\mozilla.org

I think this one is less used:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla

gary-a
gary-a Question owner
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Found entries there (as above, thanks jscher) and deleted entries entirely, and any others by searching mozilla/firefox/thuderbird but still I get the message that the profile is unavailable.

FIX for me: I had a large disc 'E' drive for storage that I renamed 'D' and Thunderbird now goes. I could not find or get Mozilla to forget that it had an installation on D drive so I had to provide it with one. Worth a look Mozilla?

user1378671
user1378671
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Firefox and Thunderbird both place their Profiles (user data) on the drive where the operating system is loaded - typically C:/ - regardless of where the user installs the Firefox and Thunderbird programs.

If you have an operating system on D: or E:, that is where Firefox and Thunderbird data files will end up. You need to know what you're doing when you do that. Mozilla doesn't keep you from doing that, but they aren't concerned about "looking" at user done changes / modifications or non-default installations.