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Firefox fails to download any file, download immediately fails.

  • 5 replies
  • 3 have this problem
  • 2082 views
  • Last reply by cor-el

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Hello Whenever I start a download, it immediately crashes, no matter what you do all downloads fail. Tried solutions that didn't work:

  • refresh ff,
  • delete profiles,
  • uninstall + reinstall.
Hello Whenever I start a download, it immediately crashes, no matter what you do all downloads fail. Tried solutions that didn't work: * refresh ff, * delete profiles, * uninstall + reinstall.

Chosen solution

I found the solution for this:

As it turns out, FF lost access permissions to the hard drive in which the %TEMP% folder was located. Changing the cache directory in about:config (browser.cache.disk.parent_directory) doesn't solve the issue, but changing the folder path in the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES does.

Cheers

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Chosen Solution

I found the solution for this:

As it turns out, FF lost access permissions to the hard drive in which the %TEMP% folder was located. Changing the cache directory in about:config (browser.cache.disk.parent_directory) doesn't solve the issue, but changing the folder path in the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES does.

Cheers

Modified by JFM02FFP2NR

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That was very good work. Well Done.

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What does does this mean: "...but changing in the folder in PATH does"??? Please better explain your statement.

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dr.fix.sgs2 said

What does does this mean: "...but changing in the folder in PATH does"??? Please better explain your statement.

Hello Short answer: the path of the TEMP and TMP folders in the environment variables

Long answer: Firefox uses in windows (and I suspect in other OSs as well) the TEMP folder to store the files as they downloads. If you check your environment variables you will see that the TEMP/TMP folder are assigned to a hard drive that firefox can't write to because of permission restrictions. In my case the TEMP path was in D: and FF only had access to C: so I just changed the TEMP path to C: and it started working again. It's a hack since it can affect other programs and you are forced to change the temp folder but for now it works. A better solution is to give FF write acess to other hard drives somehow.

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Note that current releases no longer use the OS temp folder, but download all files to the default downloads folder as set in "Settings -> General -> Downloads".