I seem to recall having this problem before, but for the life of me, I can't remember how I sorted it out.

If I try to start firefox, it just tells me to select a profile. I get the option of default or john. It doesn't matter which one I select, it just responds with "profile in use" and to do a new one.

I seem to recall last time I did that I lost all my bookmarks etc.

I've viewed a couple of threads on this - and tried the ones that suggested modifying the start command from mozilla/firefox -U% to mozilla/firefox -Profilemanager (and variations of that).

None of these seem to work and I currently can't get into firefox.

Could someone remind me how this is corrected please ???

regards

John

I had something similar a while back and my memory is also a bit hazy - but I seem to remember there was some kind of (hidden?) lock file on the profile. This was on a Solaris box so my not being able to remember the actual location probably doesn't matter too much... Currently, my Firefox doesn't seem to worry about profiles (I can start many instances of it without being asked) so I can't check for any lock files. Perhaps looking in ~/.mozilla/firefox for all files might turn something up?

Hope this helps,
Andrzej

Logoff/reboot & then reopen mozilla, make sure that you first open a browser instance and wait for sometime rather than making too many clicks at same time, which causes the said problem.

Also whenever youa re stuck up in this manner, the box which sys profile in use also suggests to create a new one, so you could always use them.

As far as your bookmarks are concerned you will find them in $HOME/.mozilla/firefox

This happened to me...I stopped the process. You are being asked if you want to continue using the currently running browser by "Default" or "John" user. For some reason Firefox's process does not end properly.

I've managed to get it working - though whether it's the correct way or not I don't know, I've changed the command in the taskbar shortcut, back to just "mozilla-firefox", deleted the default profile and logged out and back in again - "it" seems to be starting now.

Thanks all, the ideas and suggestions.

regards

John

Although you can get all your bookmarks back if you go to your home folder and look for the .firefox file. In there you will find folders which are a folder for each profile. in those there is an xml file that keeps your booksmarks. you can open them and add all the lines into one. Delete the profiles(while firefox is not running) and then start firefox, make a new profile and copy that into the new profile folder. That way you would get back your bookmarks at least. Otherwise you can copy the content of the whole directory and recopy it into the newly created one.

Dtsazza was on the right path. The reason that the profile is unavailable is because the profile has a lockfile left from an unclean shutdown. The lock file is in If you do You'll get the directory name that contains the lock file, named appropriately, lock. Just remove the lockfile, and you'll have access to the profiles again.

Peace,
JimBass

Having just had this happen to myself, I can confirm that JimBass is completely right. (Though the random string isn't entirely random - it's more like "<random string>.<profile name>", which may be useful if you have several profiles and thus several 'random' directories with lockfiles in).