Switching from new to old hard drive.

[magb]

Hi guys, I hope someone can help me on this issue, long story short I had a Dell laptop which is pretty much beyond repair right now (the motherboard isn't working anymore) so I bough a new laptop (an HP) and my basic idea was to connect my old HD to an usb adapter and that way transfer my info from on HD to another, it worked great on the exception of my emails which apparently I need to do some kind of back-up (which the program offers) in order to do this, the main issue is that I am not being able to open the program from the old HD and I was wondering what would happen if I put the old HD into my new laptop, would anything bad/wrong happen? My first though is that the harware config is way too different from one HD to another so something would go wrong... I'm not sure... Plus, the old lap was Xp and this one is Vista...

Can anyone help me on this???

Thank you!

 

[PC eye]

The first idea would be going to your ISP's start page and logging into the mail account online to see if the emails are still found on the mail server. Simply preserving/backing OE 6.0 mail won't help in Vista now seeing Windows Mail and IE 7 by default.

Generally copies of the original mail will be left on the server unless a setting change was made to see mail removed after so many days as well as when deleted in OE having the remove from server when deleted option checked off.

The one problem in trying to temporary install the old drive in the new unit long enough to see mail backed up being the files with the "DBX" file extension is the type of drive. Generally an older laptop will see an ide HD while newer models are likely to have a sata model. That would be a big headache right off!

As far as the old copy of Windows you would likely find the basics would load and you might even reach the desktop. But any number of problems with driver/hardware incompatibility, a totally new set of hardwares, etc. would likely Windows simply lock up or hard to navigate. Plus Vista now sees the "eml" file extension compared to the "csv" in previous versions of OE 5-6.

 

[magb]

Actually that is the nice part, both HD are SATA, so in theory I CAN put the old HD in my new laptop access windows do the backup and then switch HD's again and back it up right?

On the server mail, the issue is that i'm talking of over 5 years of emails of 3 different accounts, that is why I really don't want to loose them and they are of course not in the server.

 

[PC eye]

NO! I don't you will be able to retrieve mail 5yrs. old from any server at this point. That's quite a bit more involved to say the least. That's good for immediate and recent only.

The main problem you will face now however even after retrieving all that is switching to Vista from XP. The new version sees quite a few changes in Windows Mail in file extensions and a few other things. That could pose a headache right off.

One thought would restoring what you rescue on an existing XP system and forwarding to your current account for seeing those restored properly. That would then provide you ready access with the new version.