I have a problem I hope someone might be able to help me solve.
The quick (?) explanation of my problem is this:
My computer (Win XP Pro SP3) had a bad software-related failure (just a mismatch of legitimate software products, nothing to do with viruses or other malware) which seriously damaged the main hard drive's MBR, MFT and Partition Boot Record. I managed to resurrect it, just, and while carrying out maintenance intended to set it up for full and proper backups (which I hadn't had before) another mismatched software product trashed the Registry leaving the system unusable. NOTHING I tried over the following weeks (yes, weeks!!!) corrected or repaired the Registry and, finally, I had to resort to a clean install of Win XP.
One thing I did do while trying to repair the corrupted Registry was to put a RawCopy of the old System Partition onto a spare partition on the computer's main hard drive. (Virtually all the data on that old System Partition is intact although, obviously, that RawCopy partition has the corrupted registry and isn't bootable.)
Now I have my system up and running and it has the standard Administrator account set up and one User account. The old set up had a User account which did all the work, and its Administrator account was virtually never used. Certainly not for any emails. Because I was unable to use my computer for some weeks, when I got the system up and going I used the Administrator account to catch up on my emails using Outlook Express as before. But now that I have a User account on the new system I will stop using the Administrator account for email.
So I have:
Copy of the old system with recoverable Outlook Express stuff (emails, news messages, mail accounts, contacts, rules, etc.) all under a User Account and no Outlook Express stuff under the Administrator account. (That's the RawCopy'd partition.)
New system with Outlook Express stuff (emails, mail accounts, contacts, etc., but no rules) all under the Administrator account and no Outlook Express stuff under the User Account.
I want to know how to merge all these into one set of Outlook Express stuff under the User account on the new system? My plan would be to backup the emails, and folders from the Administrator account on the new system, then transfer all the old system stuff from its User account to the new system User account and finally restore the stuff backed up from the Administrator account on the new system to the new system User account. Would this all work to give me all my email and news data (emails, mail accounts, news, contacts, rules, etc.) under the new system User account?
The main thing that bothers me is that before the system crashed my email was sorted and separated into a large number of mail folders under the OE Inbox, and a large amount of that sorting and separating was done with email rules. If I absolutely had to, I could spend more weeks "rebuilding" my email "by hand", but it woud be much easier if I could re-instate the old structure and rules and then feed all the new emails (approx. 13,000 of them) to those rules.
