Missing old HDD Firefox profile after installing windows 10 on SSD

0

I had a PC with Windows 8 installed that had Firefox.

I decided to upgrade it to SSD, and to install Windows 10 fresh (not as upgrade) to the SSD.

The install went smoothly, with one (possibly important) detail - I used the same user name for my main user on Windows 10 and old Windows 8 (whose drive is now "D:" - I installed SSD as disk 0 before the install, and moved old HDD as disk #1)

When I installed FireFox on Windows 10, I went ahead to copy the old FF profile from Windows 8 on drive "D:\" ....

... only to find that the old profile is nowhere to be found, AND that somehow the profile in "D:\Documents and Settings" directory seems to be an alias to "C:\Documents and Settings" and not the original old profile.

Is this expected and due to the fact that my user ID is the same on both installs?

Is there a way to recover my old FireFox profile?

DVK

Posted 2016-06-05T20:51:24.587

Reputation: 570

Hi - are you still able to boot the old Win8 installation..? If yes, then run "firefox -p" to find where the profile is located and you can the reference that location by running the same command under Win10. I suspect you may advertantly have copied the whole %userprofile% across rather than just the FF profile - which by default is created in the %userprofile% – Jim Nielsen – 2016-06-05T21:09:57.453

Answers

1

"Documents and Settings" hasn't been used since WinXP.

You'll find your original Firefox profile in

D:\Users\<user>\Appdata\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<randomchars>.default\

Note that to see the Appdata folder you'll need to enable "Show hidden files" in Explorer folder options.

Also, on your new computer/user, you'll notice the profile name (".default") will be different. Simply copy the contents of the old folder to the new one. Simply copying the whole folder won't work as FF isn't looking for that profile name.

So copy the contents of 

D:\Users\<user>\Appdata\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<randomchars>.default\

to

C:\Users\<user>\Appdata\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\<randomchars>.default\

kisk

Posted 2016-06-05T20:51:24.587

Reputation: 347

the reason I spoke about Documents and Settings is because that's where I found FF profile directory. I suspect it was just symlinked from users\ – DVK – 2016-06-05T21:20:38.877

Asked: 2016-06-05T20:51:24.587

Viewed: 101 times

Active: 2016-06-05T21:02:57.343