[kusama]

Hey, All.

I was just browsing with firefox yesterday and then a blue screen occurred. Blue screens were not new to me since my hard drive is getting really old and I believe the blue screen was caused by my deteriorating hard drive.

Anyways, after rebooting windows ran check disk but as it was running I saw something new from my normal check disk blue screen recovery runs. It was doing something called "File cross linking" I did not know what it was so I just let it run. But after a while it stopped the cross linking thingy because hard drive space run out (my hard drive had only 4 gb of free space remaining).

It then exited the check disk and after I logged in to windows, I ran firefox. To my surprise all of my tabs, addons, bookmarks, etc. Were gone! But I was not really affected of this since I keep a back up folder of my profile folder so I just simply copy and pasted the back up unto the profile folder. I then ran firefox again and all off my things were back in order. So my problem now is that windows was telling me that free space remaining was really few. I cleaned with ccleaner, and then looked for the mysterious file or folder that ate up 3 gb of my remaining 4gb remaining.

I found out that the folder that ate up the memory was the firefox profile folder. I then uninstalled firefox and then the 3gb that the folder ate halved.

I tried deleting the whole Mozilla folder inside my application data directory, but I couldn't. I kept getting a "Cannot Delete chrome: Cannot find the specified file. Make sure you specify the correct path and file name."

So I was stumped I googled how to delete folders like these and what I did was:
-Tried deleting it with "Unlocker"
-Tried deleting it with "KillBox"
-Tried deleting it through command prompt thru the use of the "del" command
- Figured out the folder's "true" MS DOS 8.3 file, and then tried deleting it through the use of the "del" command and through deleting the whole directory (forgot the command sorry)
- Ran check disk again and tried deleting it

All attempts failed.

I really don't know what to do now. I am using google chrome as of now, and I am dearly missing firefox. Any help will surely be appreciated. Thank you very much. Good day.

[kusama]

umm, up

[hewee]

Don't really know but look at you profile folder.
C:\Documents and Settings\User-Name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\???????.default
Also look at the extensions folder to see if you have more of the same files or folders. May have a (1), (2) at the end.
But it is the cache that you could have more then one.
C:\Documents and Settings\User-Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\????????.default\Cache

A system restore can do this where it can not restore the file back where it was so it ads (1) to the end of the file or folder name. Then if you had the same thing happen before your get a (2) and so on.
System restore will tell you this so you can go in and clean things up.

But you need a new hard drive so get on now so you can get the data off your old drive before it stops on you.

If your sure you know the file or folder to delete then make sure Firefox is closed down.
May need to login to your Main Admin account to do the same thing.

[kusama]

Originally Posted by hewee

Don't really know but look at you profile folder.
C:\Documents and Settings\User-Name\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\???????.default
Also look at the extensions folder to see if you have more of the same files or folders. May have a (1), (2) at the end.
But it is the cache that you could have more then one.
C:\Documents and Settings\User-Name\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\????????.default\Cache

A system restore can do this where it can not restore the file back where it was so it ads (1) to the end of the file or folder name. Then if you had the same thing happen before your get a (2) and so on.
System restore will tell you this so you can go in and clean things up.

But you need a new hard drive so get on now so you can get the data off your old drive before it stops on you.

If your sure you know the file or folder to delete then make sure Firefox is closed down.
May need to login to your Main Admin account to do the same thing.

I just checked through dos 8.3 true name and my profile folder had a .def extension. The files did not have (1) or (2) beside their names, I also don't believe that system restore was run during the checkdisk process in which the profile folder ballooned to 3gb in size.

We really don't have any money to replace my hard drive as of now and considering this is an old laptop I suspect that it would really be hard to find a hard drive.

Thank you very much for the reply Hewee.

[hewee]

Well if you hard drive goes then your have a harder time getting data off of it. So I would back up all you want to keep to CD, DVD, Ext. Hard drive.

OK have you done a search on the date you did your restore to see what files were made?

Also check that the window temp folder is clean out and the user temp folder.

Then now sure how you did the Firefox restore but if it was any type of program then look to see if it made temp files some place.
A search on the date this was done should help you.

[kusama]

Originally Posted by hewee

Well if you hard drive goes then your have a harder time getting data off of it. So I would back up all you want to keep to CD, DVD, Ext. Hard drive.

OK have you done a search on the date you did your restore to see what files were made?

Also check that the window temp folder is clean out and the user temp folder.

Then now sure how you did the Firefox restore but if it was any type of program then look to see if it made temp files some place.
A search on the date this was done should help you.

I believe that system restore was not performed during check disk hewee. I believe that check disk was the one that "cross linked" the files and when I uninstalled firefox the crosslinks had no more reference since the original files were deleted during uninstallation. Maybe that is the reason I keep on getting a "Cannot Delete chrome: Cannot find the specified file. Make sure you specify the correct path and file name." error.

But the crosslinks are physically present in my hard drive (I believe). I mean I can see it whenever I access the appdata folder and the mozilla folder. It just can't really be deleted.

[throoper]

If you can see the Chrome folder, can you rename it and delete it?
Also try going up a directory and getting the whole Mozilla folder.

[kusama]

Originally Posted by throoper

If you can see the Chrome folder, can you rename it and delete it?
Also try going up a directory and getting the whole Mozilla folder.

Tried renaming the chrome (which was a file inside the profile folder) and also tried copying the whole mozilla directory but I still got the error message.

What can be really the cause of this? This is really troublesome

[throoper]

How about posting a screenshot of the folder containing the chrome file.
Open the folder so the chrome file is showing and then follow the instructions HERE.
Make sure the address in the address bar of the folder is showing.

[kusama]

Attached is the screenshot. The part that I erased was just my name haha. And the name of the folder which contains the chrome file was not by default "default" I just renamed it default while I was in the process of deleting the said folder. The real name was long and contained random gibberish.

[throoper]

Sorry. I guess that wasn't clear.
I was hoping to see the file itself.
Could you take another shot only this time open the default folder to show it's content.
Before taking the screenshot, though, could you please click Tools>Folder Options>View tab. Scroll down the list and remove the check next to "Hide extensions for known file types" and click OK.

[kusama]

Originally Posted by throoper

Sorry. I guess that wasn't clear.
I was hoping to see the file itself.
Could you take another shot only this time open the default folder to show it's content.
Before taking the screenshot, though, could you please click Tools>Folder Options>View tab. Scroll down the list and remove the check next to "Hide extensions for known file types" and click OK.

Here you goo throoper.

[throoper]

That's the picture I wanted to see.
Virtually none of the files belong to Firefox. Most aren't even Windows files, but Linux. Not surprising Windows doesn't know what to do with them.
By any chance did you, or do you still, have the game Harbinger and play it through the browser?

[kusama]

Originally Posted by throoper

That's the picture I wanted to see.
Virtually none of the files belong to Firefox. Most aren't even Windows files, but Linux. Not surprising Windows doesn't know what to do with them.
By any chance did you, or do you still, have the game Harbinger and play it through the browser?

I don't remember playing any game called harbinger in my browser is that what caused all of this? I actually don't play any browser games here in my laptop, this is weird haha.

[throoper]

Originally Posted by kusama

I don't remember playing any game called harbinger in my browser is that what caused all of this? I actually don't play any browser games here in my laptop, this is weird haha.

I asked because in looking up some of those file types, that game was one of the things they are associated with, and I thought maybe you were a gamer and they were still somehow connected to it. Uninstall the game and the files may be easier to get rid of. If you don't have that, then they came from something else. It was a good thought anyway.

What I would try is Boot the computer into Safe Mode.
Open that folder and try deleting the files one by one using Unlocker.
Save these files for last. Don't delete them until all the others are gone.
COMPAT/1.INI
SESSIO\1.JS
URDCLA/1.TXT

The reason being that if you can't delete the others, those three may have information that will give a clue as to what created all of the files and help in figuring out how to get rid of them. If that becomes necessary, I'll give you my E-mail address and have you send them to me.
If you can successfully delete all the others, then go ahead and delete those 3 also.