Anonymous wrote:In my particular case (I was the guest that replied four posts above), it does seem to have been a result of scandisk. I searched for "FOUND" and obtained the folders FOUND.000 and FOUND.001. Inside FOUND.001, FILE0002 and FILE0003 contained my bookmarks.
Why would scandisk randomly trash Firefox bookmarks? There's something the browser is doing which is causing this to occur. Furthermore, scandisk ran automatically after my system inexplicably crashed. I have to wonder if this was a result of Firefox itself.
Just to reiterate what I said. FOUND.XXX are files generated by the SCANDISK utility. The only way they appear on a pc is if the SCANDISK utility has been run at some point. SCANDISK will run on startup if there has been a crash or other failure to close down correctly - it runs before Windows loads, so if you are in the habit of turning on and walking away for a moment, you may not notice it running.
SCANDISK does nothing to Firefox bookmarks. As I said (and apologies if it wasn't clear enough) what I believe is happening is that Firefox itself is failing to either close or write back to bookmarks.html correctly (I don't know which as I haven't delved into the code, but from what others are saying I believe it has bookmarks.html open while the browser is open, so issue is with closing the file). A possible error is recording the length wrongly in the FAT (File Allocation Table) that Windows uses to record where the hell things are on your hard disk. Another possible error is failing to include a stop bit.
Either way, when Firefox opens again it can't find its own file. It creates a new one, which has nothing in it.
What SCANDISK, or another file recovery utility, will do is find the old file floating around in limbo on another part of the disk, which at least gives the possibility of recovering it.
Since the problem never happens to most people, and happens regularly to some poor sods, one possible explanation is bad sectors on their hard drive (I come from the days when this was much more common than now, and there were no utilities you could run in the background to clean up the mess. Norton, after all, started out making disk recovery utilities). If the bad spot coincides with the start or end bit, Firefox will not be able to load the file, and will create a new one, and it may do this on several occasions.
This suggestion only applies in situations where the user has not upgraded (different problem) or created a new profile for any reason (different problem), or also lost themes or extensions (different problem.)
Hope that makes it clear.
