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

Migrate from damaged OS hard disk to new OS without sync

more options

My laptop died damaging the registry on my WIN 10 installation, the HD and files are intact, bought a new laptop and want to migrate my old firefox installation (unsynced) I copied over the folder from the roaming folder as per the old way and opening firefox says I should sync the new version,and it has created a new profile folder, obviously I can't sync. Will renaming the old profile the same as the new one work or do I have to down the route of installing an older version of Firefox to migrate successfully?

My laptop died damaging the registry on my WIN 10 installation, the HD and files are intact, bought a new laptop and want to migrate my old firefox installation (unsynced) I copied over the folder from the roaming folder as per the old way and opening firefox says I should sync the new version,and it has created a new profile folder, obviously I can't sync. Will renaming the old profile the same as the new one work or do I have to down the route of installing an older version of Firefox to migrate successfully?

All Replies (1)

more options

It works best to keep the original profile folder name to enable extensions to link up with their stored data.

What exactly did you copy to where? For example:

  • C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox => entire old Firefox folder to here
  • C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles => entire old Profiles folder to here
  • something else

You may notice in

C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

that there are two important files:

  • installs.ini
  • profiles.ini

These files determine the default profile folder and what appears on the about:profiles page.