Hello all,

I have a second-hand Dell laptop, a Latitude E6430. I removed the Windows 7 and installed 64 bit Mint 18 Cinnamon from a "Linux Forum" magazine disc.

Somewhere, and I admit that my head is coming loose or something - it's a long story - I've managed to lose Firefox's profile. Everything I try to do now, anything at all, gets a message telling me that the profile cannot be loaded - missing or inaccessible - and I cannot get past this message.

The problem extends out to not being able to reload Firefox or do anything else to it. Likewise to the entire Mint distro, I cannot do anything with the dvd. I'd be happy to wipe the laptop clean and start all over again. Any ideas will be gratefully received!

Regards Ant

Hi Ant,

You could try creating a new profile by running firefox -P from the command line.

Hello hydrurga, that returns the same message - "your Firefox profile cannot be loaded. It may be missing or inaccessible"

Thankyou - Ant

Did you click on "Create Profile"?

Helloee, I didn't get the chance, the terminal said "Error: Access was denied while trying to open files in your profile directory." At the same time as the error messag came up.

Regards Ant

Thanks. Could be a permissions problem. Can you paste the output from:

ls -la ~/.mozilla

ls -la ~/.mozilla/firefox

Hello hydrurga,

I think permissions are behind this but I've developed some sort of brain problem which is getting worse every day - concentration is limited and joking about looking for sympathy is no longer enough!

Sorry - answer to the first Terminal query is: total 12
drwx -------- 3 mary mary 4096 Feb 3 2105. *
drwx-r-xr-x 28 mary mary 4096 Feb 21 1832. **
drwx --------- 3 mary mary 4096 Feb 3 2105 firefox

Second query:
ls: 'cannot access 'home/mary/mozilla/firefox' no such file or directory.

The trouble is that something must be there, I cannot fully remove, update, reinstall or whatever...

Regards Ant, appreciative of your assistance.

Thanks. Have you intentionally changed permissions from the norm? The reason I ask is that for that first listing, both * and firefox should really have 755 permission (the same as **).

For the second command, try again but put a . (dot) before mozilla i.e. .mozilla (it's a hidden directory).

Also, these dates are very dodgy. 1832?

Have you noticed anything else wrong with your machine lately?

Hello hydrurga, My reply has gone AWOL, this is a repeat:

I'm so used to the 24 hour clock but those times should have a hyphen in the middle as in 18:32, sorry.

Likewise sorry about the missing dot,
All three entries are drwx
The first is 21:05 . (not asterisk as I used before.)
The second is 21:05 ..
The third is now 18:59 Crash Reports

I've not changed any permissions, wittingly or otherwise. I'm willing to admit guilt where necessary, as in last year when I decided that my mouse buttons all needed a smear of hot glue to increase friction.

The computer is s/h refurbished, it came with Windows ?7 which has gone - never used Windows, wouldn't know where to start. Nothing else wrong as far as I know except the loss of face with Mary for taking too long to pass it over to her!

Regards Ant

AntOne,

Might that not be quicker?

Hello beachboy, How?

I have quite a pile of "LXF" discs and I'm sure I should have enough knowledge but I feel the labels are falling off the drawers in my head!

But thankyou for your interest - Regards Ant

AntOne,

On another computer download the Linux Mint .iso file and then burn to DVD, making sure to check the md5sum for burn integrity.

https://www.linuxmint.com/release.php?id=28

Verify ISO:
https://linuxmint.com/verify.php

Boot from the DVD.

Hello beachboy, noted and thankyou. How is this a better route than using one of the two LXF disc featuring Mint 18 in the last couple of months? In the past I've found them very good.

I envy your address, we've just spent a week near Aberdyfi in the sun while the rest had rain and fog..

Regards Ant, Ellesmere

AntOne,

Look out for the return of the Dyfi Ospreys next month, or watch them via live streaming:
http://www.dyfiospreyproject.com/

If the LXF disk is okay then use that.

Good luck next time.

Hello hydrurga and beachboy, at last!

I've been poking around in the boot sequence menu to see why the disc won't do anything; on some previous occasion I'd enabled the Legacy ROM bit, unticking it enabled the disc.

I've just reloaded Mint 18 from the same disc as before and all seems ok, subject to further tests. Especially Firefox, my life might be my own again!


In answer to hydrurga's earlier query, those two commands now give:

mary@mary-Latitude-E6430 ~ $ ls -la ~/.mozilla
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 4 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:20 .
drwxr-xr-x 18 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:19 ..
drwx------ 2 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:20 extensions
drwxr-xr-x 4 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:10 firefox
-rw-r--r-- 1 mary mary 3 Feb 22 21:10 firefox.last-version
mary@mary-Latitude-E6430 ~ $
mary@mary-Latitude-E6430 ~ $ ls -la ~/.mozilla/firefox
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 4 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:10 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:20 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:20 Crash Reports
drwxr-xr-x 14 mary mary 4096 Feb 22 21:32 mwad0hks.default
-rw-r--r-- 1 mary mary 94 Feb 22 21:10 profiles.ini
mary@mary-Latitude-E6430 ~ $


I'm very grateful to you both for your help and encouragement - thankyou!

Regards Ant