Automatic Conversion of Netscape Profiles to Mozilla on Windows Only Works Under Perfect Conditions
Dave Aiello wrote, "I recently replaced the hard drive on my wife's PC because the old one was beginning to fail. Once I got her irreplaceable data off of the old hard drive, I decided that I didn't want to do a disater recovery restoration. Instead, I replaced Windows NT 4 with Windows 2000, Office 97 with Office 2000, and Netscape 4.7x with Mozilla 1.2.1."
"I had done a Netscape to Mozilla migration before for my own computer. But in that case it was a few Mozilla revisions ago, and it took place on Linux, not Windows."
"When I got ready to migrate a user profile, I was surprised to find that Mozilla did not appear to provide an automated tool to do this in one step. Yes, there were Import options on the Tools menu when the Mail & Newsgroups window was open. But, these did not work with the ease that I expected, considering how similar the Netscape and Mozilla profile data was."
"After several hours of trial and error, I figured out what the problems were. The Mozilla profile migration tool only works if your profile files in exactly the right place. Read on for more details on how I solved the problem...."
Dave Aiello continued:
These are the conditions that appear to be necessary for an automatic profile conversion to take place:
- The Netscape profile that you want to convert must be in the proper location, given the version of Netscape that you were previously using. In our case, this meant that we had to restore the data to:
C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users\PROFILE_NAME- The Mozilla application must never have been run, prior to the profile conversion attempt.
If either of these two conditions were not met, Mozilla would not ask me if I wanted to convert a profile when it was started.
I'm pointing this out because I had difficulty finding help on this issue using Google. I'm posting it here because I believe it will be indexed and add to the Internet-wide Mozilla knowledge base.