Tips on salvaging old PC files

By Anne Krishnan

Q. My trusty old Pentium 4 machine has finally gone to that great bit bucket in the sky. The motherboard fried, but I was able to salvage the hard drive. I put the hard drive in an external enclosure and plugged it into the USB port on my new machine. I can now see all the folders and files from my old C: drive. I have two questions. How do I get the Outlook 2003 contacts off that external hard drive and into my new Outlook 2007 application? And how do I do the same with my IE favorites?

A. First, you need to find the file where your old Outlook e-mail and contacts are stored, said Joel Broadway of CMIT Solutions of Raleigh, N.C.

Assuming your external drive is drive E, your contacts are probably stored at E:/documents and settings/Username/localsettings/application data/Microsoft/Outlook/Outlook.pst, with the space for “username” being the Windows user ID (such as Bob or default) that you used on the old PC.

If you can’t find them there, you can run a search for files ending in .PST on the external drive by going to “My Computer,” clicking on the drive, and then clicking “Search.”

Copy and paste the location of your .pst files into a document for reference in the next step.

Now open Outlook 2007, click on “Contacts” on the left, then go to “File,” “Import and Export,” and follow the directions to “Import from another Program or File” to import your contacts from that .PST file.

During this process, you’ll need to insert the location of the files that you saved above.

To import your Internet Explorer shortcuts, you will want to go back to “My Computer,” find E:/documents and settings/username/favorites and copy them all. If you have Windows XP, you can then paste them in C:/documents and settings/username/favorites; if you have Vista, open IE and go to “Favorites,” then import them from the folder on the external drive.

Q. In December, we bought a new desktop PC. The retailer said he would back up the files from the old PC onto the new PC. But I can’t access the e-mails that are now backed up. They show up as a DBX file, which I can’t open. (Our old PC ran on XP and we used Outlook. We now have Vista and Mail.) What’s a simple, safe method to view my old e-mails?

A. Your old e-mail was apparently stored in a file format used by Outlook Express, Broadway said. You should be able to import your old e-mail into your new Windows Mail.

First, open Windows Mail by clicking the “Start” button, clicking “All Programs” and then clicking “Windows Mail.”

In Windows Mail, click on the “File” menu, point to “Import” and then click “Messages.” Click “Microsoft Outlook Express 6,” and then click “Next.” Make sure “Import mail from an OE6 store directory” is selected, and then click “OK.”

Click “Browse,” find the Outlook Express folder that was copied to this computer, and then click the folder once to select it. (Do not open the folder when you select it.) Click “Select Folder,” and then click “Next.”

Click “All folders” to import all the folders, or click “Selected folders” and select which message folders you want to import, and then click “Next.” Click “Finish.”

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2009 The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.).