304045 - Accounts Disappeared - Nothing visible

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, defect)

Description

[gumasteprakash]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041107 Firefox/1.0

ON BOOTING PC, THUNDERBIRD REFUUSED TO START IN NORMAL FORM. INSTEAD IT SHOWED
BLANK FORMAT WITH ACCOUNT WIZARD ASKING ME TO SET NEW ACCOUNT. ALL FOLDERS ALONG
WITH SUB FOLDERS AND DATA ARE LOST.  

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.NOT APPLICABLE.
2.
3.

Actual Results:  
NOT APPLICABLE

Expected Results:  
THUNDERBIRD SHOULD NOT HAVE CRASHED MAKING ME LOOSE ALL DATA.

Comment 1

[Adam Guthrie]

Your profile probably got locked. Start Thunderbird with Start > Programs >
Mozilla Thunderbird > Thunderbird (profile manager) and choose "default" as your
profile. This should restore all of your mail.

Comment 2

[Ray Booysen]

Monitoring the IRC channels in the #thunderbird channel, I have seen 3 people in
the last 4 days come in with this problem.

I will point them to this bug for reference.  Hopefully we can find the cause of it.

Comment 3

[philippelanglois]

Confirmed with 1.0.7... I still have a fully populate profile but nothing appears in Mozilla..

Comment 4

[Gustavo]

(In reply to comment #3)
> Confirmed with 1.0.7... I still have a fully populate profile but nothing
> appears in Mozilla..
> 

I have the same problem!! and the profile manager didn't work

Comment 5

[jwq]

Procedures for restoring a forgotten profile may be found here <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail>.

 I have seen this bug (although not recently). Perhaps it could be confirmed if it also appears in recent builds? Gustavo, what is your Thunderbird version?

Comment 6

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

*** Bug 345198 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[Gustavo]

(In reply to comment #5)
> Procedures for restoring a forgotten profile may be found here
> <http://kb.mozillazine.org/Disappearing_mail>.
> 
>  I have seen this bug (although not recently). Perhaps it could be confirmed if
> it also appears in recent builds? Gustavo, what is your Thunderbird version?
> 
The last one: versión 1.5.0.4 (20060516)

Comment 8

[Gustavo]

I solved this problem
1) Backup profile folder
2) uninstall, delete everything. Reinstall
3) copy the bacuped up folder. ONLY REPLACE INBOX.* files

Comment 9

[Adam Guthrie]

*** Bug 325904 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[jwq]

*** Bug 335178 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[jwq]

*** Bug 351807 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 14

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

Ahh here's the bug.

Something is acting like the RDF corruption bug (files are being written when reboot terminates the process and so the files being written are left corrupted) and losing the account data from prefs.js, I have some example files from people I've helped in #thunderbird, I'll find them and add them (minus personal info).  I've got one that looks like it was a default prefs.js today (pasted below), but there are others that I'm sure *only* had the accounts info missing.

# # Mozilla User Preferences
#  
# /* Do not edit this file.
# *
# * If you make changes to this file while the application is running,
# * the changes will be overwritten when the application exits.
# *
# * To make a manual change to preferences, you can visit the URL about:config
# * For more information, see http://www.mozilla.org/unix/customizing.html#prefs
# */
#  
# user_pref("app.update.lastUpdateTime.addon-background-update-timer", 1175628712);
# user_pref("app.update.lastUpdateTime.background-update-timer", 1175628712);
# user_pref("mail.smtpservers", "");
# user_pref("mailnews.quotingPrefs.version", 1);
# user_pref("mailnews.ui.threadpane.version", 5); 

Comment 16

[Aaron]

Thanks for your email majken..

I can confirm that my prefs.js file also looked near blank like this one above.
The date/time of my prefs.js file was updated when I had Thunderbird open even with the "New Account Wizard" thing popped up.

So Thunderbird was actively changing this file etc. It was already wiped when I went to get it to upload here for you..

Now that I have all my folders and accounts set back up, the prefs.js file is massive full of all my settings once again.

So I guess my contribution to this discussion is that by the time Thunderbird was started up asking me to add fresh new accounts, the prefs.js file was already a default one once again freshly written to by Thunderbird.

Comment 18

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

This bug is only/mostly about the case where prefs has been blown away, correct?

critical seems more appropriate. (even though user data may be intact, prefs is gone)

Comment 19

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(Off-Topic)

(In reply to comment #18)
> This bug is only/mostly about the case where prefs has been blown away, correct?

No.

As seen in many many DUP'ed bugs to Bug 193638, this bug and bugs DUP'ed to this bug, bugs listed in dependency tree for Bug 193638(with "Show Resolved"), no bug report has clear description about (a) deleted prefs.js, or (b-1) partial prefs.js, or (b-2) corrupted prefs.js data, or (c) missing pointer to prefs.js(coruption of registory.dat/profiles.ini).
Some added comments like comment #14(looks b-1 case) is exceptional.
And, there is no evidence that added comments to a bug is for same problem(same phenomenon, same cause), except that same external syptom of "user has to define account again after restart" happened on comment poster too.

Read Bug 392956 and Bug 422447, please. These are not report of specific problem. It's rather question about frequently reported above external symptom to forums. I was trying to record bugs which may produce above (a), (b-1), (b-2), (c) when I met such bugs. So these bugs are stil kept open, although these are not real meta bug nor bug for specific issue.

Comment 20

[WADA:World Anti-bad-Duping Agency]

(In reply to comment #14)
> # # Mozilla User Preferences
>(snip)
> # user_pref("mailnews.ui.threadpane.version", 5); 

Majken "Lucy" Connor, prefs.js was cut of at there? (no lines here after?)
If yes, it sounds same phenomenon to Bug 462006(bug opener says "truncated prefs.js").
Can you attach corrupted prefs.js file and file information(timestamp's such as creation time, last access time, ..., size, extent information etc.) to Bug 462006?

Comment 21

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Everything associated with this is older than 10 years, and those involved are apparently gone. So let's close this in favor of more recently reported bugs and bugs with more detail.