Extracting outlook express emails from Windows 98

rgratto2

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I reformatted my parents hard drive in order to install windows XP. Unfortunately, i forgot to back up the emails before i did so. I did, however, make a backup image using norton ghost. I have since been attempting to retrieve the emails and have been very unsuccessful. Websites that i googled on this topic all say that the easiest way to remove emails from it is to actually run the application and export them somehow. Seeing as how i reformatted the drive, this isnt too terribly easy. Has anyone successfully done this before? Any tips/recommendations? I attempted to just put the backup image onto a drive and boot the windows 98(ick) back up, but was having many many problems with this. All i know is that Thunderbird makes this a whole lot easier... :(
 
If you want to try it manually, search for the *.mbx files on the old computer and drag them over to the new one (either by importing or by manually stuffing it into the Outlook Express folder).

The *.wab file in the same location should be the address book if you want to save it too.
 
alternate approach...

if you got a spare hard drive, then disconnect your parents existing one, hook up the spare hard drive in its place, load the norton ghost image onto the spare hard drive, extract the messages through outlook, and get the exported files off the machine. reattach the old hard drive, and import in the messages.

also, don't forget to get the address book along with the actual e-mails.

hth!
 
I agree with PTNL, but I would also update the outlook express/I.E. to the latest version before saving the identity files to transplant to the XP drive.
 
Zamboni said:
If you want to try it manually, search for the *.mbx files on the old computer and drag them over to the new one (either by importing or by manually stuffing it into the Outlook Express folder).

The *.wab file in the same location should be the address book if you want to save it too.

That was the same thought i had. Upon building their upgraded PC, i placed their drive in it(still with windows 98). It booted, but before windows fully loaded it kept trying to install drivers for the new hardware. However, since it was windows 98, it somehow kept looping through these install messages and wouldnt let me get past(even if i canceled). Therefore, I think i would need this restore drive to go directly into the old PC. The problem here is that all the drives that i personally have are Sata, aka no good for 10 year old hardware. The old drives are IDE. I tried to do this with one of the old drives, and...after about 5 hours spent trying to get it to work, I decided it was not possible. I even borrowed a drive from my friend, but it was already broken. I couldnt even boot with it. Basically, this has been quite the nightmare.
 
Is there any way to know which .dbx files they may be? I had already recovered them but there were about 40 some, spanning 3-4 different accounts. That meant that many of them had duplicate names and such. I.E. difficult to sort through.
 
PTNL said:
if you got a spare hard drive, then disconnect your parents existing one, hook up the spare hard drive in its place, load the norton ghost image onto the spare hard drive, extract the messages through outlook...

I did this this weekend; I got the image onto a hard drive, but it wont boot! I tried using fixboot through the windows xp repair console, and i also tried using fdisk /mbr through a windows 98 boot disk. Any ideas?
 
Does it actually need to boot? Last I knew, 98 didn't include anything like account protection. Couldn't you remove the XP harddrive (for safety), put in another drive, ghost image onto it, put XP HDD back in, boot to XP, then pull the files off the other HDD through explorer? Seems like that would be the easiest thing to do.

That way you don't have to worry about actually getting INTO 98 (and thus, don't have to worry about installing hadware onto an OS that may not like it).

As to the accounts, I can't help much there. I never really used multiple accounts in OE. You could just import all the mail and then I think that you can move emails around accounts, but don't hold me to that. I stopped using OE a while back (moved to Thunderbird; wish Thunderbird had a good export option).
 
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