Firefox refuses to start, disk going crazy

Hi,

I’ve got OpenSUSE 11.0 running in VMWare Workstation 6.0. I’ve got Firefox 3.0.1 installed, and running in GNOME. Initially Firefox was running fine, but OpenSUSE freezed on me so I had to restart the VM. This happened a few times.

Now whenever I try to start Firefox, all I can see is there is constant disk I/O but Firefox never comes up. After 2 or 3 minutes, nothing happens so I had to kill it.

Has anyone come across this behaviour? How do I fix this? I hope I don’t have to re-install the entire OS.

It hardly seems necessary to re-install the whole OS.
try starting firefox from a terminal and see what it shows there.

Is the problem only FF, what about other browsers, install Opera or Seamonkey.

Thanks for the respond. I forgot to mention that Firefox exhibits the same behaviour whether I start it from the GNOME application menu or from the terminal.

I certainly won’t mind giving Opera or Seamonkey a go, but I’d like to understand the root cause of why FF is doing this. It was running fine at the beginning when I first installed the OS. Watching the disk thrashing constantly without seeing FF coming up is very annoying.

atlas08 wrote:

>
> Thanks for the respond. I forgot to mention that Firefox exhibits the
> same behaviour whether I start it from the GNOME application menu or
> from the terminal.
>
> I certainly won’t mind giving Opera or Seamonkey a go, but I’d like to
> understand the root cause of why FF is doing this. It was running fine
> at the beginning when I first installed the OS. Watching the disk
> thrashing constantly without seeing FF coming up is very annoying.
>
>

The initial freezing might have caused some corruption of Firefox’s
databases. I’ve notice that the new FF3 uses sqlite3 databases quite
extensively.

You might try deleting your entire firefox profile by deleting the .mozilla
subdirectory.

(make sure firefox is not running)

cd
rm -r .mozilla

from a console, or ‘View Hidden’ in file browser and delete it there.

Try it again then.


L R Nix
lornix@lornix.com

Sweet! That did it for me. Deleted the .mozilla folder and FF came up straight away.

Thanks lornix.