Transferring Thunderbird to new PC

[GeoffBishop]

Following online advice, I have copied and pasted my Thunderbird profile to my new PC and have installed Thunderbird. However, on opening Thunderbird, this copied-over profile is not found. How can I get the newly installed Thunderbird to access my profile?

[DanRaisch]

From what you posted you did the process in reverse order. You should install Thunderbird but abort the initial account creation, after which you paste in the transferred profile so that it can be found. Try tweaking the file profiles.ini so that it points to the location of the transferred profile. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Profiles.ini_file

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

[tanstaafl]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Move_to_a_new_PC
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Moving_your_p ... hunderbird

Thunderbird doesn't discover profiles by looking in the Profiles directory. It looks in the profiles.ini file to find links to what profiles exist, instead. Try copying the profiles.ini from your old PC over the profiles.ini file for Thunderbird on the new PC. That's in the parent directory of the Profiles directory (C:\Users\windows_username\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird)

If that doesn't help, look at the links Dan and I suggested.

[GeoffBishop]

Thanks guys. Following your advice, I took the simplest route first. I uninstalled Thunderbird from the new PC and deleted the Thunderbird file in the ROAMING folder. I then installed Thunderbird on the new PC again, then copied across the Thunderbird files again and on opening Thunderbird for the first time, Hey Presto!