difficulties with firefox, mouse playing up?

hi

everything was working fine

watched a youtube video - partway through it froze

i ended up rebooting and i'm now faced with the following very strange problems.

firstly, i cannot change preferences in firefox. if i try to change security or homepage settings or whatever, they do not change when i restart firefox.

secondly, all of my bookmarks vanished.

thirdly, when trying to change some aspects of preferences, or even at times when searching in google, i am unable to "click" the mouse to activate my search, either by left click or double tap. neither will the "enter" button work.


very strange and now my netbook is effectively useless.

i haven't yet got the option of reinstalling it as i don't have a big enough pendrive.


anybody able to shed any light on this?




scrumpypaul

 

Sounds like you have corrupted the harddrive. I'm not sure how you're going to run fsck on that drive without booting from a livecd. Maybe someone else around here can help you with that?

One thing you can try to do is to just rename the configuration files for firefox so that the system sets them up anew and see whether that gets you back to using firefox. The problem is you'll lose all settings in firefox including whatever bookmarks you have. But this you can retrieve (see below).

This is what I'd try and do.

Close firefox.

mv .mozilla .mozilla_backup

Start firefox and see whether that gets you back.

In future if a program like firefox locks up and the whole system isn't locked up (which usually isn't the case with Linux), just kill firefox. To do this:

open a terminal and do:

killall firefox

You can look in .mozilla_backup and find the bookmarks.html there. With your newly running firefox, you can import the bookmarks from the backed up ones you made above.

If all is well, then just delete the backed up .mozilla_backup directory:

rm -rf .mozilla_backup

HTH

Cheers.

 

thanks rbil

firefox now working, though i wasn't able to get anything done re bookmarks - i'll just sort it manually

 

So it looks like the old bookmarks.html is corrupted if you can't import it.

Cheers.

 

There is a way to restore your lost bookmarks, although no guarantee it won't happen again. (Did you shut down your Acer without closing Firefox? If, say, Firefox froze up? That can reportedly corrupt Firefox's settings so the next time you use it it's as if it's never run before.)

Open My Files, and navigate to My Disk. Add to the address line so it reads:

My Disk:///.mozilla/

and press [Enter].

It has a subfolder named "Firefox". Open the Firefox folder. One of its subfolders is a collection of random characters with an extension of ".default". Open this folder. One of its subfolders is called "bookmarkbackups" -- open that. On my system the address line now reads:

My Disk:///.mozilla/firefox/i903f5rd.default/bookmarkbackups

This folder, wonder of wonders, contains daily backups that Firefox automatically makes of its bookmarks.html file! Each backup file has a filename format of bookmarks-yyyy-mm-dd.html. Choose the latest good one, copy it to a more convenient location (I use Documents), run Firefox, and click on the Bookmarks menu, and click on Organize Bookmarks. Then, under the File menu in that utility, choose Import... and follow the prompts to bring in the backup bookmarks file you chose.

After you've restored your bookmarks, I really urge you to export the bookmark file again, with the Organize Bookmarks utility...better safe than sorry.