Hi chevyowner,

Please start Firefox with the Profile Manager: Profile Manager - Create, remove or switch Firefox profiles Run this in the cmd.exe window:

• On 32-bit Windows: "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p
• On 64-bit Windows: "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p

Select the previous profile in the list. If the profile is not there look in that folder and see if there is another directory. Recover important data from an old profile

I really hope you find the old one. If you have any other questions, happy to help.

If you have submitted crash reports then please post the IDs of one or more recent crash reports that have a "bp-" prefix:

• bp-xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx

You can find the IDs of the submitted crash reports on the about:crashes page.

• You can open the about:crashes page via the location bar, like you open a website, or open the crash reports page via "Help > Troubleshooting Information".

See:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mozilla_Crash_Reporter
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Mozilla+Crash+Reporter

If you can't open Firefox, see:

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mozilla_Crash_Reporter#Location_of_crash_reports
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Mozilla_Crash_Reporter#Viewing_crash_reports

• https://developer.mozilla.org/How_to_get_a_stacktrace_for_a_bug_report

There is only one profile as seen by the profile manager. There are no crash reports for this.

Do you have a profiles.ini file?

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/profiles.ini_file

Delete the profiles.ini file in case there is a problem with the file.

• Use the Profile Manager to create a new profile
• Use "Choose Folder" when you create a new profile to select the location of a lost profile and recover this profile

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager
• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_folder_-_Firefox

Yes I have a profiles.ini, I do not have more then one profile.

Contents from profiles.ini [General] StartWithLastProfile=1

[Profile0] Name=default-1398400732582 IsRelative=1 Path=Profiles/g5q6smfr.default-1398400732582 Default=1

Contents of the Profiles folder from a command prompt C:\Users\Nick\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles>dir

Volume in drive C is HDD
Volume Serial Number is 20B4-43D2

Directory of C:\Users\Nick\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

04/24/2014 10:40 PM <DIR> . 04/24/2014 10:40 PM <DIR> .. 04/26/2014 01:57 PM <DIR> g5q6smfr.default-1398400732582

              0 File(s)              0 bytes
              3 Dir(s)  546,797,871,104 bytes free

C:\Users\Nick\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles>

There is one Windows User account on my PC.

I will have to add more after I try deleting that file, but I don't expect it to help. I will need to close Firefox to do that.

deleting that file just removed the new profile, so I restored the backup I made before deleting profiles.ini.

As per the original question I simply want to know how to prevent my Firefox profile from being deleted by Firefox again. The old one is gone. That is fine, but I don't want to allow it to happen again.

After you have deleted the profiles.ini file you can use the Profile Manager to create a new profile.

• http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_Manager

On one of the windows you see a Choose Folder button that allows you to reuse a previously used profile folder that is still present.
That way you can start with a clean profiles.ini file and still use the old profile in case there was a problem with the old profiles.ini file.

I am not trying to recover what is gone. Like I keep saying I am trying to prevent it from happening again.

If files got corrupted after a crash then best would be to run the chkdsk.exe program to make sure that no files were damaged. Files like the profiles.ini that aren't in the profile folder shouldn't get corrupted by crashes and if this did happen then this crash was quite serious and possibly happened during startup. It is also possible that security software was having a lock on the file that has caused a new file to get created. It is hard to tell what has gone wrong in your case as I've never lost a profile or had issues with the profiles.ini file as the consequence of a crash.

I found the files, but I am not going to test them. For some reason when this happened the entire profiles folder was moved to the desktop and renamed.

I'm not sure what most people do but I don't look for any kind of file from any program on the desktop after any kind of crash.

chevyowner, what was the name of the new folder? Did it happen to be "Old Firefox Profile Folder" or something like that? This happens when you reset Firefox: Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings and Recover important data from an old profile may be helpful for restoring the profile. However profile.ini should have been recreated the next time you opened firefox, I think.