mozilla/Firefox lost bookmarks and tabs

Every so often when I open my mozilla/firefox browser I discover all our bookmarks have disappeared along with our Tabs. Going to Firefox help it says to go to the Profile manager to check if the profile has changed, but for the life of me I can't access the Profile manager. Consequently we have to redo all the bookmarks which is a royal pain!!! It doesn't happen often, but why is this happening? I'm running XP, AVG anti virus, Spybot, Spywareblaster, and CCleaner. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

 

First, lets see if we can get you into the Profile Manager. Make sure Firefox is completely shut down, check in the Task Manager "Processes" tab to make sure it's not running in the background. Go to Start > Run, type in firefox.exe -p (and don't leave out the space after exe), the press OK. If that doesn't work try
firefox.exe -profilemanager.

Second, You need to start backing up your Firefox profile. You don't need the Profile Manager for that, and it will allow you to restore the data from a lost or corrupted profile to a new profile. See this article for detailed help: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profile_backup

 

Thanks for your reply. I had no luck accessing profile manager. After making sure firefox wasn't running, I I entered "firefox.exe _p", under run and got a biography website, When I entered, "firefox.exe _profilemanager", I got a mail-archive web page. When I enter bookmarks.html under search and open it, it takes me to the firefox web page. i have no idea what is going on!

 

Also, I tried to backup Mozilla/Firefox folder by copying it to my documents, but when I try to open "favourites", which I assume is the bookmarks, I get an error, "Microsoft JScript runtime error Code 800A138F".

 

There's no "favourites" in the Firefox profile, bookmarks are stored in a folder called bookmarks.html. When you were searching for that, did you enable search for hidden files and folders? In the Search window, click "All files and folders" > "More advanced options" (scroll down to see it) > "Search hidden files and folders".

However, the redirects you got when you tried to access the Profile Manager and bookmarks.html make me think you have some malware on your computer you need to clean out. Start out by going here and following the instructions: http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407