My previous Windows XP had a terminal hardware failure, and before disposing of the computer I kept the hard drive as that contained all of my data (and it is still in working order). I would now like to recover a number of Outlook emails to my new Windows 7 computer also running Microsoft Outlook. I plan to use a USB disk caddy to transfer the relevant data from the old hard drive onto my new computer. Can you provide any advice or assistance with this task?

You will be glad to know that transferring the email data from the hard drive onto your new computer should be a relatively straight-forward task. I am glad that you are already familiar with using the USB caddy for connecting the old hard drive to the new computer. For the benefit of other readers, such USB caddys allow you to connect a physical hard drive and the caddy then connects to the USB port on a computer. That hard drive can then be accessed just like any other USB drive, as the caddy essentially provides a USB interface to the hard drive. Such caddys are incredibly useful for recovering data from old hard drives without having to open-up a computer and then internally connect the hard drive onto the motherboard.

Once you have connected the drive the next step is to locate the PST file containing your email. Outlook stores email within a Personal Storage Table (PST) file. This name sounds complicated, but you just need to know that the PST file contains all of your Outlook email. On a Windows XP computer the PST file is likely located in the following location: :Documents and SettingsLocal SettingsApplication DataMicrosoftOutlook . Be aware that you may need to enable the display of hidden files and folders and file extensions to find (and identify) the .PST file. To do this, press the ALT key in Windows Explorer (to show the menu bar) then go to “Tools” > “Folder Options” > “View” tab and enable “Show hidden files and folders” and disable “Hide file extensions for known file types”. Click OK to save and enable the settings. If you cannot find the PST file in that location then you will probably need to search the drive for that file.

Once you have found the PST file I suggest that you copy the file across to a more convenient location, such as the desktop. This is very important, as you will see later. Once this has been done we can import the messages into Outlook. Open Outlook and then (depending on the version of Outlook which you are running) go to the “File” menu > “Open” > “Outlook Data File”. Navigate to the PST file that you copied to the desktop and then open this file. You will see that the PST file opens in the Folder List and you can view all the messages contained within. Be aware, at this point you have not actually imported the messages – you have just opened the PST file located on the desktop (we’ll call this the old PST file, for sake of clarity below) and are viewing the contents of that file. Therefore, I suggest that you select and copy the messages that you wish to keep across into the new/active folder structure in Outlook (i.e. the folders containing your new messages, which are stored in the new Outlook PST file on your computer which was created when you setup Outlook on your new computer). You may notice that when you drag the messages into the new folder it actually moves the messages – this is removing the messages from the old PST file on the desktop and putting them into the new, active Outlook PST file. This is why we made a copy of that old PST file, rather than operating directly on the one on the old hard drive, as this means we can keep the original old PST file on the old hard drive intact and unmodified in case we need that again in the future. Once you have finished copying/moving the messages, right-click on the old PST folder in Outlook and select the option to close the folders. You can now also remove the PST file which you copied onto the desktop, as that’s no longer needed.