Problems migrating TB to another PC

[OMPBiker]

I had a computer die on me so I put together another PC and slaved in my old hard drive as the D: drive in the new computer. The instructions for migration in the support docs leave me scratching my head...

It says to go to the user appdata folder and copy the profile. My confusion is that there are 2 profile folders one in appdata/low and apdata/roaming. The one in low is around 130 GB and the one in roaming is a bit under 10 GB.

What is the easiest way to get Thunderbird to use my old profile? Also I've been using a webmail interface for about a week and I need to get this right so that when it downloads the messages from my online inbox they will be in the inbox on TB with the older messages saved there...

Tony

[DanRaisch]

The one in "Roaming" is the true profile folder. See this article -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Transferring_ ... hunderbird
For a concise, less detailed version of the process, see this thread --
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 5#p7251375

For an alternative approach, see tanstaafl's posts in this thread -- http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... #p14209121

[OMPBiker]

I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I forgot that in the past my profile was moved to C:\TB_profile. Using the instructions in the help file, this is what I tried.

I copied the TB_profile from the old drive to c:\TB_profile

I ran thunderbird.exe -p and deleted the profile shown and create a new one and select the c:\TB_profile

I run Thunderbird and it come up wanting me to start from scratch. What am I missing?

Tony

[DanRaisch]

See if this article points to the source of the problem -- http://kb.mozillazine.org/Recovering_a_ ... isappeared

[OMPBiker]

I checked the profiles.ini file and the path to my profile folder is correct. Any other suggestions?

Tony

[OMPBiker]

I've also tried adding -profile "C:\TB_profile" to the command line in the Thunderbird shortcut with no luck. The prefs.js file is not damaged and the location of the profile is correct.

I've tried running thunderbird.exe -p several times. I've even gone in and manually deleted the profiles created in roaming and local. I'm at the end of my rope here and I'm running out of ideas... In the past I was able to just crate a new profile and copy the contents of the old profiles in but that's not working either.

[DanRaisch]

Wait, unless I'm misinterpreting your report, it sounds as though you may have reversed steps in the process above. If you first copied in the desired profile (the one from the old system) and then created a new profile targeting C:\TB_profile, the newly created empty profile would overwrite the transferred data.

Delete everything in C:\TB_profile.
Create a new profile in that location.
THEN copy the profile data from the old system into that new profile, making sure to copy the old profile starting in the directory below the profile name. That will avoid impact on the profiles.ini file.

[OMPBiker]

I deleted all the files in C:\TB_profile. I then ran thunderbird.exe -p, deleted the profile shown and then created a profile in C:\TB_profile. I did not run Thunderbird at this point and there were no sub-folders in C:\TB_profile. I then copied all the data from D:\TB_profile to C:\TB_profile. I then ran Thunderbird and it came up wanting me to start from scratch like before.

Dd I miss a step?

[DanRaisch]

Is the Windows user ID on this new system EXACTLY the same as on the old?

[OMPBiker]

Yes the ID and password are the same as the old computer.

[OMPBiker]

I'm not sure what I was doing wrong but somehow I fixed. It downloaded all the mail I had left on the server....

Tony