Recovering OE inbox from failed harddrive

[The Stoneman]

I have recently replaced a failed hardrive on a dell laptop (XP) and rebuilt the replacement. I was able to access the failed drive by slaving it and copying to another internal drive. I have copied the .DBX and .WAB files to the appropriate folders on the new drive. In OE, I can see all of the folders that are listed under the inbox in the folder menu, as well as the address book. All of those folders contain the original emails that were stored in them on the old drive. The inbox, however is empty. There were many, many, many emails that were not filed into folders. What step have I missed? Any and all help appreciated.

[jdc2000]

Link:

http://www.oehelp.com/

[The Stoneman]

Thanks for the link. I went through the appropriate answers and could not find any reference to anything that I had not already done. Every bit of the reinstallation of dbx and wab files was complete except for the inbox. Any other thoughts? Much appreciated.

[Welshjim]

The Stoneman--Perhaps this program will help
http://www.updatexp.com/tip23.html
A download of a free, older version is here
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/fil...scription.html
Another program is http://www.oemailrecovery.com/outloo...-recovery.html

[The Stoneman]

Jim,
Thanks for the links. I tried the free DBXtract and was successful extracting all the emails from the inbox but have no clue how to reincorporate them into OE on the reapired laptop. I tired to use import in OE but that did not work.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Stoneman

[Welshjim]

The Stoneman--What file extension do the recovered emails have? .eml or .dbx?
If .eml, I seem to remember that you would open the Preview Pane of the OE Inbox and drag and drop the email files into the Preview Pane.
If .dbx try this http://support.microsoft.com/default...B;en-us;252603

[The Stoneman]

Jim,
They are an .eml extension. I tried dragging to the preview pane and that worked, though the body of the emails are not formatted correctly. They contain some symbols and numbers where text should be. Is this a result of the older version of DBXtract or is there something more I can do. Sorry to be so much trouble. Thanks for the help.
Stoneman

[Welshjim]

The Stoneman--If these emails had been deleted and you recovered them from the hard drive, I suspect they were partially written over while considered deleted. I doubt there is anything you can do about that. Regrets.
P.S. Even though you used the free version of DBXtract, did you read the instructions in http://www.updatexp.com/tip23.html ?
See the Recovery Mode section at the end.