Well I've joined the ranks of lost bookmarks. And yes, they are definitely lost. I have an old Xerox laser printer on my machine running XP SP2. When I print, the system occasionally reboots on me. So I always save before printing. It's happened a number of times within FF and with other apps. Never been a problem. Well today it was a problem. I was trying to print something and had FF running the background. My system rebooted as usual. Not a big deal, never been one as long as I saved my document first just in case. But this time I lost my bookmarks. First thing I did was go and look at the profile but no luck. I was unaware of the backup bookmarks kept my FF and learned about it on the web so went and checked that. Also no luck. By profession I do forensic data recovery (well actually more than just data recovery, but not important). My first thought was to go to the office and use some of my tools to try and find my bookmarks in unallocated. But I decided not to, as I could import my bookmarks from IE and ended up losing only about 4-6 months of newer stuff.
Now these next steps I am suggesting as a means to recover bookmarks is not for the faint of heart.
I then decided to boot over to my Linux partition (on a separate drive). From within Linux I confirmed which drive/partition I wanted to work on - in other words where bookmarks are saved (hda2 in my case). I ran the following command line as root# cat /dev/hda2 | strings | grep "<DT><A HREF=" >bookmarks.html. A few explanations here, I am displaying the entire content of the partition, piping it to strings (so only printable caracters are displayed), and then filtered (grep) for lines that have <DT><A HREF= in them (which is how bookmarks are saved in bookmarks.html). I then piped the output to a file called bookmarks.html. My primary partition is about 15 gigs. It processed it in under 5 minutes. One caution when doing this is if you already have a file called bookmarks.html in the directory in which you ran this command, this will overwrite it.
This works best with minimum amount of activity on the system after you discovered you've lost your bookmarks. Because all activity (even just booting the system) writes to the drive, and potentially could overwrite some of this deleted data. You will notice some of the lines will have lots of garbled text with it. This is base64 icons from what I can see from the .png file used to display the icon associated with the bookmark. But the actual bookmark will still be in front of this.
You then have the task of going through the file that was created and finding all those old bookmarks and either navigating back to those pages and resaving, or just you may be able to use the import feature (I didn't try that yet, just finished this a bit earlier). If you want to be even more thorough, you could try and find the first line of the bookmark file and then figure out the size of the bookmarks in unallocated, and dd them back out to a file. But what I suggest works out well enough to at least get them back, and then some (because there will be others in unallocated and allocated, because we are working on the entire partition, including other users). If you have encrypted file system enabled, this will not work obviously because your data will be encrypted.
If you don't have a Linux partition on your system, you could use a bootable live Linux CD (such as Knoppix, Helix, Mepis, Suse Live 9.1, or any other). But to save the output, you'll have to mount a floppy, a flash drive, or a FAT32 partition on a local drive (or mount a network drive if you want, but a floppy or flash drive would be much, much easier). Because if you output it to the local directory in the live environment, that will be lost when you turn off the system.
I purposely didn't provide step by step instructions on how to do all this because I would not encourage a novice to try this. Like I stated at the beginning, not for the faint of heart. If you've never used Linux at all, or even never used command line in Linux (because you'll have to use fdisk to confirm the partition you want to work on if you are unsure), I don't recommend this. You could also mount the partition read only if you have NTFS support so you can browse it first to make sure you are running it on the right device. Those with enough comfort level will be able to stumble through these instructions without damaging anything.
yay!
