TechLife Australia – September 2019

[ 086 ]

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 LEVINSON

Malfunctioning 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 an

HELP

STATI

ON

Q AND A

external 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 MS

These are most probably kernel panics, when

something so serious happens to macOS that its

only 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 OAKLEY

Use 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.