Thunderbird migration problem from PC to new iMac

After enduring enough laptop PC hard drive failure/machine rebuilds to become an epic, I have crossed over from the Dark Side. My iMac is a brand new 21.7" Core i3 with OS X 10.6.4. The transition has gone remarkably well.

I use Mozilla's Firefox as my browser of choice and their Thunderbird as my email client. I had no problem migrating Firefox from the PC to the iMac. I have a fairly good understanding of Mozilla's profiles. I understand that this is a Thunderbird issue and have posted on their support site with absolutely no results.

Trying to get Thunderbird (TB) up and running on the iMac has been quite a bear.

I downloaded TB and installed it on the iMac. I drilled down to TB>Profiles folder and opened the xxxxyyyy.default folder. I deleted all of the files from the xxxxyyyy.default folder. The laptop is running as a virtual machine using VM Fusion. I drilled down on the laptop to TB's profile folder aaaabbbb.default. I then selected all of the files in the VM's aaaabbbb.default folder and did a drag and drop to the iMac's xxxxyyyy.default folder. I used the text editor to open the iMac's profiles.ini to ensure that it was pointing at the iMac's xxxxyyyy.default folder.

TB launched and I went about the business of sorting emails and filing them in my very extensive folder tree. As I was shutting down for the night, I noticed that the icon in the app folder for TB has a grayed out international NO symbol over it. I quit TB and then tried to relaunch. It immediately crashed. I repeatedly tried to launch and it crashed each time sometimes generating a crash report and sometimes not.

I have read every thing I can find on migrating Mozilla, profiles.ini, profile.default, prefs.js, etc., etc. and have gone through the above process at least three more times.

This is my small business computer and I need to get TB up and running ASAP.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Charlie

Unless I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to do.....

Here is what I suggest trying: uninstall T-Bird from the iMac and reinstall. Make sure you locate all the T-Bird files (use Spotlight to search). Then on your PC use the export feature from email. You should then be able to use the import feature in T-Bird on your iMac. I'm not sure what you're doing by deleting files and then dragging and dropping files from the PC to the iMac?

Also, what do you mean by the laptop is running as a virtual machine? Are you running VM software on the laptop? What is the guest OS then? Is the PC networked with the iMac? ??

Sorry if I'm not following you, but your post is a bit confusing to say the least.

I'm not sure what you're doing by deleting files and then dragging and dropping files from the PC to the iMac?

Also, what do you mean by the laptop is running as a virtual machine? Are you running VM software on the laptop? What is the guest OS then? Is the PC networked with the iMac? ??

Click to expand...

I am running the Windows machine on the iMac using VMFusion. It is the guest on the iMac. The guest OS is Windows XP Pro w/SP3.

Migrating Mozilla products (Thunderbird and Firefox) from one machine to the other has always been fairly straightforward. Load the product on the receiving machine, copy the profile from the donor machine and paste it in the receiving machine's Mozilla product's profile.

When I went thru this process with Firefox, it worked flawlessly with the Windows laptop running as a VM under VMFusion on the iMac. When I tried with TB, the problems detailed, somewhat verbosely, in my original post occurred. What is strange is that TB will launch correctly once. When I quit it and then relaunch, it crashes.

Sorry if I'm not following you, but your post is a bit confusing to say the least.

Click to expand...

Sorry for the confusion. Hopefully it is a bit clearer now and you can help me sort it out.

Charlie

I simply copied the TB profiles folder from my Windows 7 users/me/AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird. Works fine.