Firefox and Thunderbird are not working after I overcrowded the partition and had to use Ubuntu recovery mode to make some space.
I OK-ed a question which read: continuing will remount your filesystem in read/write mode and mount any other filesystem defined in /etc/fstab. Do you wish to continue?
I think I am capable of finding and re-pointing Thunderbird to my profile, but Firefox still shows banners, bookmarks etc.: it has only lost its passwords. - I am loathe to overwrite what's left and keen to understand where Ubuntu has taken me.
Sorry for my ignorance!

So what is the problem, if there is?
So far, what did you toward recovering Firefox passwords?

It is easy to recover firefox passwords database if that's what you need.
so long as resizing did not erase your old login account.

Thanks for posting. I managed to get my Firefox back by relaunching, and was relieved I didn't change anything. Thunderbird, I manged to change the .ini file text to bring it back to my old profile, but one of my biggest problems was trying to bring up the Profile Manager in Linux. Can you advise on this, by any chance?
Thanks again for your help.
Rupert

What distro are you running? and what do you mean by "Linux Profile Manager"?
What profile for example?

Hi and thanks. I was just trying to follow th instructions on a forum where it said 'Bring Up Profile Manager' in Thunderbird. I don't know ho to do that, although a friend had set my pre-crash Thunderbird to ask which profile I wanted to use before launching each time. I was wanting to re-enable this...

Okay I understand it now. I don't use thunderbird anymore, it was the first light versions I experienced, but I'll try to figure out to you this solution, (so pardon me if I am found wrong in the current mozilla configuration.)

1. Check your configuration folder, it is usually found in a hidden folder you can see if hidden files read enabled:
should return you a folder with subfolders ".mozilla/thunderbird". Now look for for some folders inside that looks like this "xxxxxxxx.default" then copy the name of that folder into the .mozilla/thunderbird/PROFILES.INI as a value to "Path=copyItHere" then try launch thunderbird. If the "xxxxxxx.default" profile isn't what you like then replace the line with another, there should be plenty of profile folder inside the .mozilla/thunderbird/here then repeat the procedure.

2. Another way is simply to back-up all about .mozilla folder first then playfully try all data files that are found in every "xxxxxxx.xxxx" folders inside .mozilla/thunderbird/xxxxxx.xxx profile folders. Look for files like:
"xxxxx.db"
"xxxxx.sqlite"
try get these files from other similar folders, put them into the xxxxx.default and launch. You should notice that your configuration changes as well as the bookmarks and even your contacts.

Back up first to avoid regrets.

Hope that works.

Good luck.