This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Windows had fallen into BSoD taking all tabs away

  • 6
  • 4
  • 27 views
  • Nzaghachi ikpeazụ nke cor-el

more options

Recently I had my laptop go BSoD. After I restarted Windows and launched Firefox, I realized that all of my opened tabs, carefully sorted into groups weren't there. I googled some info about this issue and found out that all previous sessions are stored in sessionstore.bak / .js files. So I downloaded Recuva and searched for those files in my firefox profile folder. Fortunately, most of them weren't corrupted, so I was able to recover them. They hapened to be significantly larger, than current sessionstore file, so i felt like a hunter :) My question is simple: How do I "feed" at least one of tose files back to firefox? I tried replacing existing one, but browser kept overwriting it. What should I do?

Recently I had my laptop go BSoD. After I restarted Windows and launched Firefox, I realized that all of my opened tabs, carefully sorted into groups weren't there. I googled some info about this issue and found out that all previous sessions are stored in sessionstore.bak / .js files. So I downloaded Recuva and searched for those files in my firefox profile folder. Fortunately, most of them weren't corrupted, so I was able to recover them. They hapened to be significantly larger, than current sessionstore file, so i felt like a hunter :) My question is simple: How do I "feed" at least one of tose files back to firefox? I tried replacing existing one, but browser kept overwriting it. What should I do?

All Replies (6)

more options

Nice a hunter! Happy to help, the file that is current is the sessionrestore.bak file. Or at least that is the one that is loaded. You will want to rename the session.js file to sessiontest.js and copy the one you have in the .js format. Then open about:sessionrestore and the tabs should show up.

Did this help?

more options

You can check the sessionstore files and open the file in the Scratchpad (Firefox/Tools > Web Developer).

  • Click the "Pretty Print" button to format the file
more options

Sorry, still nothing. Maybe my hands grow from wrong place or somthing, but neither Scratchpad nor session-file approach had result( I didn't even find session.js file, since there are only sessionstore.bak and sessionstore.js. Replacing both of them with old version of sessionstore.bak (and/or renamed to .js) didn't result in anything than completely new session and empty about:sessionrestore page. Here is screenshot of my profile folder if that can help...

more options

Are you using any extensions that deal with session storage as I see a Sessions folder in the screenshot?

To restore a session you would have to use "Show my windows and tabs from last time" for the startup setting.

Did you check the content of the recovered sessionstore files because it is not enough if Recuva shows that recovering is possible and have been done successfully?

more options

I installed an extension during my attempts to recover session, but it did not help, so I just removed it. No, I didn't check content of the files. How can I do that?

more options

I wrote that above in one of the replies.

There should only be plain ASCII text in the file.