Where do you read about doing it that way?

You should have copied the contents (all the internal files and folders) of the old Profile into the new Profile folder. Now Firefox isn't recognizing the name of that old Profile, because it isn't listed in the profiles.ini file.

If you opened Firefox, you should have a new default Profile to replace the one that you deleted - if Firefox can't find the Profile it expects to find (based upon the Profile name), it automatically creates a new Profile.

You can't "switch" to a Profile that isn't listed in the profiles.ini file. The profiles.ini file is where the Profile Manager looks for all the available Profiles a user has.

This is the correct way of getting the data from an old Profile into a different Profile. It will delete data files in the 2nd Profile and replace that with the data files from the 1st Profile.

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Recovering+important+data+from+an+old+profile

Instead of repeating steps 2 thru 5 for each individual file, you can highlight one file ad then use {Ctrl + A} to highlight all the files and copy /paste all those file all at once, instead of individually.

You need to copy the file profiles.ini as well or create a new profile and choose the imported profile as the location for that new profile to make Firefox recognize and use it.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/profiles.ini_file
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_missing_profile

Thanks, guys. It was the choosing the imported profile as the new location for a newly created profile that threw me - the way it's set up, it makes it sound like you're overwriting it. I'd done everything else right.