156293 - Cant convert old profile due to "not enough space" although I have plenty of space.

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 151188

(Core Graveyard :: Profile: BackEnd, defect)

Description

[ISHIKAWA, Chiaki]

After a strange lockup of my linux PC (and ran a fsck once),
the next time I tried to run Mozilla 1.1a,
it seemed it lost track of my old profile.
Mozilla suggested to pick up new profile and all I could see was
 - ishikawa (seems like an old netscape profile?!)
 - default user.

I don't know why, but mozilla thought "default user" was in use and
s I could not use it. No other copy of Mozilla was running.

Naturally, I didn't want to lose everything, and so
tried to see if I could use "ishikawa" entry.
It turned out that mozilla thinks this entry is from old
netscape, and suggested that it would convert to
Mozilla format.
But when I tried conversion
I faced errors.
Mozilla claimed that it can't convert the
provile because...

 Cant convert old profile due to "not enough space" 

although I have plenty of space. 
I thought that Mozilla may have signed/unsigned comparison problem in handling
the disk space comparison
since my partition had more than 2GB space left. 32bit int
could handle only up to 2G while unsigned int can handle upto 4GB, etc..
I suspect there IS such a signed/unsigned issue  because observed that
before the remaining space is above 2GB, mozilla would not even try
to convert: it showed the complaint notice immediately.
After I create a large temporary file to reduce the remaining
space below 2GB in the partition where
my profile is kept, at least mozilla now displays a status bar showing
it is trying to convert (a rotating screw bar a la barbar's shop).
But then again, after a second or so, it again complained about
lack of space.

After the creation of large
temporary file, currently my disk space looks like this and my .mozilla directory is
a symlink to /u2/ishikawa/mozilla. Note that /u2 has close to 2GB of
free space.
My home directory is /home/ishikawa, which is under "/".

ishikawa@duron$ df -k  
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6              7053444   6415624    279524  96% /
/dev/sdb5              6052392   3772932   1972008  66% /u2
/dev/hda11             1968588    919560    949028  50% /dos-vmware-dir
ishikawa@duron$ 


There are three major questions.

- Why did Mozilla lose lost my profile in the first place?
  Is there a way to recover it?

- Why did mozilla complain that the
  profile "is in use"  when I tried to use "Default User".
  That forced me to either create a new profile or
  try to use the existing profile, namely "ishikawa".

  Since I could not use "ishikawa" because mozilla refused to convert,
  I had to create a new profile and start from scratch...

  What is the algorithm used by mozilla to see if a "user profile" is in use? 
  The detailed knowledge of this may help me in figuring out what went
  wrong on my computer, especially file system...

- Is there a way to salvage the older profile somehow that I have
  used with Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1a?

My current .mozilla directory contents look like this:

  lrwxrwxrwx    1 ishikawa users          20 Apr 21 23:50 .mozilla ->
/u2/ishikawa/mozilla/
ishikawa@duron$ ls -l /u2/ishikawa/mozilla
total 72
drwxr-xr-x   15 ishikawa root         4096 Jul  9 02:31 ./
drwxr-xr-x    6 ishikawa root         4096 Jul  9 02:29 ../
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Apr 24 01:16 Default User/
-rw-r--r--    1 ishikawa users        9402 Jul  9 02:32 appreg
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Jul  9 02:31 ci/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Apr 21 23:51 ishikawa/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Apr 21 23:52 ishikawa-1/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Jul  9 02:30 ishikawa-10/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Apr 21 23:52 ishikawa-2/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Apr 21 23:53 ishikawa-3/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Apr 24 01:16 ishikawa-4/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Jul  9 02:16 ishikawa-5/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Jul  9 02:17 ishikawa-6/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Jul  9 02:22 ishikawa-7/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Jul  9 02:23 ishikawa-8/
drwxr-xr-x    3 ishikawa users        4096 Jul  9 02:26 ishikawa-9/
ishikawa@duron$ 

Somehow only the ishikawa and Default User entries are
suggested as usable profile when Mozilla starts and
Default user was claimed to be in use?!
I checked if another copy of mozilla may be running
by mistake, but it didn't.

From the very perplexed.

Thank you in advance for the great piece of software.
I hope my bug report is of some help in giving finishing touches to
the program.

PS: is the use of ".mozilla" as symlink to another directory, and
on a DIFFERENT PARTITION from my home directory at that
a bad idea? (I noticed a failed link system call during my
light debug effort using strace and seeing system call sequences.
At least I hope mozilla checkes this if such a configuration is bad.
From the system call traces, I could not find
anything obvious...

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

no blocker..

Comment 2

[ISHIKAWA, Chiaki]

Here is my own follow-up.

Now, after a few hours,
I found that the dying mozilla (which presumably
was killed when the system locked up.)
left a file (actually a symlink) named "lock"
under "Default User", which was my previous
profile.
After I removed "lock" (by "rm lock")
I could start mozilla as before and
my profile was kept intact (or it seems so far.)

Should/Can  I  simply add the comment 
to this effect in the bugzilla?
(At least this solves the "profile in use"
part of my question/inquiry.)
  
Mathias Versen kindly let me know the following in an e-mail.
"There is already a known bug about a problem with the lock file.
this lock file points to a PID and Mozilla should get another PID if you
restart mozilla.
Mozilla should now detect that this lock is invalid and removes it."

It seems that my problem is very much related to this.
But in my case, for some reason,
the profile manager got into play and
confused me very much.

It may still be a very good idea to figure out why
the old netscape profile could not be converted even
though I had plenty of disk space.

One down, two more to go(?).
 

Comment 3

[ISHIKAWA, Chiaki]

Now I am trying to change the severity to "major" but
it did't work at the first try.

Comment 4

[Grace Bush]

*** Bug 167249 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

*** Bug 183903 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

.

Comment 7

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

sorry for the SPAM

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 151188 ***

Comment 8

[K'Trina Medina]

Verified as a dupe of bug 151188