Recover HD info

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Many thanks for any replies - I'm at wit's end. The mother board crashed on my Pentium III system (been great for about 8 years!!).

I need to get my windows app data from the HD. I can use it on as a slave on another computer but since I can't bring up (can I?) WIN from the slave I can't get to my Internet Explorer nor Firefox favorites. I can't get to my Outlook address book nor folders. I really need these files.

Can anyone tell me 1) how to identify these and where they are 2) how to get them to my new master disk?

Both computers are WIN XP HOME.

I thought I could just take the old HD and put it as a master in the new PC but I found and was told that this is not possible due to some relationship between the HD and the system it came from.

Please help!
 
you can perfectly easily get your previous settings from one PC to the other. You can also retreive all your previous emails from outlook express.

As an administrator-level user, with your folder options set to 'show system folders', Your favourites are stored in c:\documents and settings\admin\favourites just copy them all over to the same location on the new system.

Firefox can simply import the favourites from IE.

and your emails are in c:\documents and settings\admin\local settings\application data\identities\{C4A....B9D}\Microsoft\outlook express as a load of .DBX files

You mount your old drive as a slave in your new PC, and do a straight copy, You must create all those folders (empty) in your new system first, so the copy overwrites them. There are other ways too, no doubt someone will give you a pointer to a utility to export and import them all. The problem is you cannot do this because your existing Windows does not work - a straight data file copy is your only option.

also see http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308670 which describes how to copy your address book and so forth. You cannot do this because your old Windows does not work, but the background info is useful.

As to running the old HDD in a new PC, the advice given was completely correct (for a number of reasons). The only thing you need to know is since the motherboard is different, there are a few dozen different drivers for the hardware that need to be changed undeneath windows....something done the once at installation time.

As a matter of policy, I would recommend you put the old drive in the new PC and use it as a backup drive (if it is big enough and reliable). Invest in system imaging software such as Acronis trueImage or Norton Ghost, and take a full drive image onto the backup drive every few weeks, plus daily backups of your most vital data using (say) zip etc to perform an update.
 
Many thanks!

I got another disk and loaded XP then used the damaged disk as a slave from which I copied over everything. No way to port OUTLOOK files to OUTLOOK EXPRESS as the formats are very different. All else went well.
 
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