Help, I hit "remove all" in password mgr

I accidently hit "remove all" in Password Manager.
There is no "are you sure" warning. THERE SHOULD BE!!!!!!
Any way I can retrieve them, before I turn off my PC??

 

Only if you have a backup of preferences with Mozbackup.

 

No backup. But my PC is still on and I have not exited Mozilla.

What file should I look for, and is it overwritten or toggled between versions? It is not in recycle.

I have been looking for a Mozilla file that changed at about the time I ******* up, so far nothing.

Is there any hope, or am I SOL?

 

It was the same experience that prompted me to run nightly backups.

 

JGB,

With no backup of your Profiles folder, if you have Windows XP, don't you have a feature similar to "GoBack" which allows you to restore to a certain point? If so you might consider that, or else bite the bullet, and start again with the passwords.

Please read this: Preventive Browser Maintenance

Ramona

 

Thanks Ramona,

I decided to rebuild the p/w file. Didn't think of W-XP restore.

That doc. of yours was well worth printing, thanks.

Now I have a new problem. I cannot get my mail. Tells me the p/w failed, but gives me no access to a logon screen to enter my p/w. It did once yesterday, but I entered wrong p/w and it now no longer appears, even after a cold boot.
How do I force the logon screen?

 

Well, I fugured out how to force the p/w d-box to show, by opening P/W Manager and deleting the entries to my mail provider (Yahoo).
But it won't now accept the correct p/w's I use to successfully get into Yahoo mail via their website.

Also in my salted dir, I found the numbered p/w file. I also found an old p/w file with a different number, from when I restored my old Mozilla a year ago. Most of the p/w's in that are still valid.
How can I transfer that file to the current p/w file? I tried to rename the old to the new, but it did not work.

 

1 down, 1 to go....

I stumbled onto the reason my mail p/w did not work. In my advanced server settings, for some reason there were 2 extra, but wrong, server entries. When I deleted them, leaving the 1 good one, my mail worked first time.

Now, how can I copy my old p/w file to my new???

 

You can right click|copy the old file, and paste to the new profile. I don't know what it will do, nor if there is any harm. It may ask you to replace the old one, or, if negative, cut the existing file, and paste it somewhere as a backup. Do all this with your program open. Now, open the program again, keeping your fingers crossed. I don't think that there is any risk to it.

 

That was the very first thing I tried, even cold booting after. Did nothing. And I could not open the p/w mgr, until I cleared it of the old stuff. Tried renaming the old to new, same thing.

I love Mozilla, but there are some serious design omissions, mostly asking "are you sure?" for potentially destructive functions, such as "remove all" in this case, resetting wallpaper (since fixed in V1.7 I hear), and lack of internal backups of critical files, when changed; such as the bookmark file, the password file, and a few others. Yet the useless Download manager prevails. Useless, because you can do absolutely nothing with it except look at the files you downloaded, or delete the list. If we had the function to download again, it would have some value, but as a log, nada.

BTW, setting the D/L file to Read-Only to stop it from getting loaded, seems not to work.

 

As for the password manager, I did a test with a profile which saw better days, but still works. I Cut it .s file, and Paste it outside the .slt folder. Then, I Copied the .s file from another unused folder, which had a lot more passwords than the the original one. I then Paste it in .s-less profile. All it did was to give me a blank password manager. But I was able to use the original PW. I don't know if editing the prefs.js would help, but the file seems to be tied to the profile.
As for the download manager, I don't argue with it. I just delete the listed files, since they are of no use, and only detrimental. It is a most foolish contraption, which is, fortunately, corrected in Firefox.
I consider these programs to be in constant evolution, and I am willing to be forgiving.
One has to remember that everything was Netscape, and a lot of features of 4.x were removed, and changed. And, only slowly were returned. The Mozilla suite will continue only with security updates, so, it is in the same boat as NS4.x., i.e. no development.
The development is going on with Firefox and Thunderbird.

 

JGB,

Try this:

Close Netscape and Quick Launch
Remove all *.s password files from your salted (*.slt) folder.

Next, open Netscape, and open a web page which requires you to enter your password. This will create a password file, e.g., 12345678.s

Close Netscape/Mozilla
Now that you have created a password file, e.g., 12345678.s
Next: copy the somenumber.s password file from the OLD salted folder, to the new salted folder.
Rename the newly created password file to X12345678.s
Rename the OLD password file to 12345678.s

This should work...

Ramona

 

Thanks, but I've gone past this. I've rebuilt many of my p/w locked sites, the more imoprtant ones, so I don't want to risk it at this time. I'm now keeping a backup paper p/w list, the exact no-no, but I have no choice, as there is no protection against accidental loss of file.

I hope Firefox & Thunderbird have this necessary protection.

Let's close this thread, please.