I had same issue. When I tried to sign onto sync to recover my bookmarks, I was redirected to pocket (which I cannot stand). Apparently it is supposed to somehow solve my problem by giving me a place to tuck away those special webpages.

I have recovered bookmarks before after reinstalls due to major FF crashes. I did a site search and found advice on recovering bookmarks. Apparently the recovery of bookmarks now takes place by syncing between machines and browsers, and not through our accounts.

This left me hanging. Sounds like you are in the same boat (along with quite a few people who have posted about this). I suggested to FF that they do as Lastpass does. I have restored my passwords quickly and simply with the use of my masterword. Sort of like FF used to do with their "account passwords".

I guess I have to conclude that there is no way to get my bookmarks back. It boggles my mind that, of all the different services I use, the one that will use the nuclear option on all my data is not my email or my bank, but my internet bookmarks. This means that I lose a lot of important references that I can't just pull out of my memory to look up again, and I have to regard FF sync as essentially useless.

Sorry, the security design doesn't allow nondestructive password resets.

Did you preserve any of your old Windows data? It would be in a folder named C:\Windows.old\ -- if you have one of those:

To explore that, turn on viewing of hidden files and folders: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/show-hidden-files

Then look for

C:\Windows.old\Users\your-user-name\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

Assuming you find one or more folders there, one of them most likely will have your earlier Firefox data.

We can describe how best to rescue data from that temporary location (Windows will delete it after 30 days so don't put it off).

I managed to recover my bookmarks in a round-about way. I can't recall the exact sequence, but I'll describe the process to you. Perhaps you can cobble together something. I recalled that in a previous Firefox event, I had been able to "import" bookmarks from one browser to another, but couldn't remember which ones I'd used. In this case, FF was not willing to work for me. So I set up Internet Explorer (it's there but you have to do a search for it) and also found a stub so I could install an older version of Opera, which I then updated. Then I downloaded and installed Chrome. Not my favorite, but it does what I need. I think Opera was able to find and download my bookmarks from FF. Then I was able to download then into Chrome, which is now my primary browser. I'm not sure I ever got IE involved, but I keep it around just in case I need to download something again. Can't swear to the exact sequence, but the point is that at least one of the other browsers was able to identify and download the links. Hope you can muddle through and capture your links too. Worth a try: it won't destroy anything, and they are imported as links.

FF eventually somehow figured out how to "remember" my bookmarks, which is good, but I am not using it because of severe crashing issues on my computer. Chrome crashes at times too, though infrequently and only the active tab, which it then oops for so I know what happened and am not just left hanging. I can even reopen the tab if I want. FF just disappears lock stock & barrel. Since it has done this repeatedly on 2 new computers and my old one, I decided for now not to use it.