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he simply wanted to roll things back to how they
previously worked. Sadly, there’s no option to
restore your Firefox tabs and other settings to an
earlier configuration in the way System Restore
can, but as a last resort you could always restore
Firefox to its default state without removing
bookmarks, passwords, open tabs and other
essential information.
To do this, open a new tab and type
about:support into the Address bar to access
Firefox’s troubleshooting page. You’ ll see a
‘Refresh Firefox...’ button below ‘Give Firefox a
tune up’ – click this and a pop-up dialog box will
confirm what’s being removed, namely all
add-ons and browser customisations, plus
resetting the browser preferences back to their
defaults. Click the button again to complete the
roll-back and hopefully Firefox will start to
behave as you remember it.
CATHERINEELLIS[HARDWARE]
Optical drives no
longer work
I have two DVD-RW drives and my PC has
stopped recognising them. If I left-click either
drive I get one of three errors: ‘not available’;
‘not accessible’; or ‘access denied’. Can you
help please?
BILL LEVINSONMalfunctioning optical drives are often
linked to permissions issues, but Bill also
revealed that the Windows 7 Backup tool was
failing to run, too, with an error about being
unable to create a shadow copy. We asked him
to connect various USB drives, and while anHELPSTATIONQ AND Aexternal DVD-RW drive threw up the same
error, he had no issues accessing flash and
external drives. Bil then worked his way
through the official troubleshooting advice
doled out by Microsoft only to find removing
and attempting to reinstall the IDE/ATAPI
drivers through Device Manager rendered his
PC unbootable.
His fail-safe backup – EaseUS – failed with a
PCI device driver error, forcing him to reinstall
Windows from scratch. At this point Bil was
given an error about the drive being MBR-
formatted while the BIOS was UEFI (a common
setup for compatibility reasons). Bil was able to
fixthisbyconvertingthedrivetoGPTformat
bybootingintotheemergencycommand
promptthroughhisWindowsinstalldisc– see
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
server/storage/disk-management/change-an-
mbr-disk-into-a-gpt-diskforinstructions.
AfterWindowswasupandrunningagain,Bil
discoveredthathisDVDdrivesandWindows 7
backuptoolwereworkingperfectlyagain,
confirmingthatit hadbeena Windowsissueall
along.
IANSLEIGHTHOLM[HARDWARE]
Mac Mini
shuts itself down
Recently, My Mac Mini has started shutting
down spontaneously. It starts up quite
normally again, so why should it do this?
DA N W I L LI A MSThese are most probably kernel panics, when
something so serious happens to macOS that itsonly way out is to shut down your Mac. Their
most common cause is a hardware problem,
such as a disk error or memory failure. Before
looking any further, restart in Apple
Diagnostics or Apple Hardware Test – see bit.ly/
diaghwt for instructions on both.
If the test suite reports an error code, contact
an Apple service provider to have that
addressed, or arrange for advanced diagnostics
to be performed at an Apple Store’s Genius Bar.
If your hardware is fine, run First Aid in Disk
Utility, preferably in macOS Recovery (see bit.
ly/mf1staid), to ensure that your drive(s) are in
good order too.
Diagnosing a software cause is tricky,
particularly with the new unified log in macOS
Sierra onwards. When kernel panics start out of
the blue, suspect any software updates or
installations made just prior to them starting:
they may well be responsible.
HOWARD OAKLEYUse the Refresh
button to roll
Firefox back to a
working state.you can run First Aid in Disk Utility
(preferably in macOS Recovery) to
ensure drives are in good order.