Yesterday I upgraded to Firefox 3.5 and noticed that my saved passwords didn’t show up. Instead it had a new “password store,” i.e. the ones that I was saving now were working fine, but the ones from 3.0 were lost. After some research I ended up on this post. So, Firefox 3.5 uses an sqlite database (signons.sqlite) to save passwords while 3.0 used a plain text file (signons3.txt). The normal upgrade process would have migrated your passwords correctly, but in my case I had Minefield (Firefox’s dev version) installed before the developers got around to creating the migration script. So, I had signons.sqlite by the time I upgraded to the official release, which ended up leaving that as-is. Anyways to fix this…
- Go to your profile folder
%APPDATA%/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/xxxxxxxx.default/ - Make sure there is
signons3.txtin this folder. This is your passwords files from Firefox 3.0. - Close any open Firefox windows.
- Backup
signons.sqlitesomewhere and remove it from this folder. - Restart Firefox.
This should recreate signons.sqlite and your passwords should be recovered. Have fun.