Porting Outlook 2000 Account Data From Win98SE to WinXP

[YrbkMgr]

I have an old Win98 machine that was dedicated to two tasks, one of which was Email. I used Outlook from Office 2000 for email. The hard drive began making noise, and is on the brink of dying. I copied everything from the hard drive (a whopping 20 gb HD, lol) over the network to an external drive.

I have installed Office 2000 onto an XP machine that is replacing this one. I now need to set up Outlook with all of my account information from the Win98 machine. I'm looking to simply (or not so simply) port my email account data to the new machine without having to go through the painstaking task of setting up everything from scratch.

I have already loaded the the PST files from a backup that I made, so that's there, now I want to see if I can just import Outlook Data from the old USER.DAT into the XP Machine and get up and running as fast as possible.

Let's start here. I have no workable Win98 systems to use to do any registry editing. I have used a program called WIndows Registry Recovery to load the USER.DAT on (yet another) XP machine. I was able to find where Outlook 2000 stores the Account information in the USER.DAT, which apparently is: .DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\OMI Account Manager\Accounts.

Where I'm kind of stuck, is this program, WRR, allows one to "export" the entire registry, or a registry KEY only, to a REGEDIT4 format. Upon exporting, it asks for the Enter Key Prefix or Root Key for export. I just don't know what to enter there.

I'm not a novice, but I know that messing with the registry without knowing what you're doing can result in disaster, and, well, I am not sure what I'm doing, so I'm at a stopping point.

My question is, what's the easiest way to port that old Win98 Outlook 2000 account data to a fresh installation of Outlook 2000 on an XP machine?

Any thoughts?

 

[christinebcw]

OK, a more thorough reading of this - you're trying to install the User Account information, not the email-data. Hmmm... I've never had success doing this and always had the original machine up and running to accomplish these re-types.

But this isn't possible for you, yes?

Something tells me all the MAIL HOST spellings are easily re-created, and the UserID is, too... it's that password, isn't it? Hmmm....

I'll dig around and maybe I can find some old guides at the office tomorrow...

 

[YrbkMgr]

I appreciate the attempt. The old hard drive clicks loudly when starting the Win98SE machine. I was lucky enough to port the entire contents of the C drive to an external removable drive. So... the "re-types" isn't possible.

I'm amazed that Outlook (Microsoft) doesn't have a way to port outlook account data to another machine.

 

[christinebcw]

Well, no luck here. I don't have a duplicate setup (lacking a viable Win2000 account to set up - I have the software, but none of us have any Outlooks anymore).

Will that drive boot up?

I wonder what a clone-attempt would do, thus moving that drive's contents of a new (er, probably used, but different) drive.

Outlook and Outlook Express have always had limited migrations for even their data (mail) files, and when Win7 halted OE's availability, many fans considered the torch & pitchfork routines. Frankly, as someone who cleans up after these accounts, I am sooo happy to get rid of OE and all of the POP systems.

There is one more option... Thunderbird did a great job of importing from OE. And I THINK it did a full, total-account & data import. But that was 2 years ago when I did it so I don't recall precisely the steps or any problems.

But if I could clone or copy the entire OUTLOOK directory structure onto a drive and install Thunderbird (probably an older one - I think FileHippo maintains older copies), I'd try to see if that software couldn't import Outlook 2000's files and setup.

 

[YrbkMgr]

Thanks for that. I'll look into Thunderbird.