help! lost emails

[quagmire]

Recently upgraded windows ME to 2000.
Appeared to be good (certainly more stable) until i tried to open outlook express(my default email) . When i did i received a warning saying outlook express was installed incorrectly and that there was an error.
After clicking 'OK' OE opened but all previous emails were missing and an another error message appeared when i tried to open my address book.

Question: have i lost all my emails and addresses? If not how can i retrieve them again?

(edited for typo's)

[Memetic]

Search your drive for : dbx and mbx files

This should show up you old mail files, you should then be able to import them into OE. Import is on the file menu I think you need to import messages and contacts separately.

[quagmire]

Thanks memetic
Found dbx files but i cant import them to OE.
Also every time i try to access my address book or if i try to send an email i get an error message telling me OE is setup incorrectly.
I assume ill have to re-install OE but i'm not sure how to go about it, also i dont want to wipe my old emails (if i haven't already)

[Memetic]

What exactly does the error message say?

Did you find any .mbx files?

[quagmire]

no mbx files showed up on a search

when i try to open my address book it says "the address book failed to load, OE is incorrectly configured. please re-install'
if i try to create mail it says " there was an error opening this meassage. An error has occured"

[quagmire]

guess i need to know how to reinstall outlook express properly. Then retieve my old files (if they still exist)
Can anyone help here?

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

quagmire,

I wonder if the files were not overwritten when you did the upgrade?

The way Win9X based OS's and WinNT based OS's handle OLE is very different.

Win9X based store the OLE info in the Windows Directory and WinNT based store the OLE info in the Documents and Settings Directory.

If the files are still there, then follow these steps:

OLEXP: Windows 98 Upgraded to Windows 2000 Does Not Import Outlook Express Messages.

If you want to reinstall OLE:

OLEXP: How to Reinstall Microsoft Outlook Express 5 in Windows 2000

And finally here is an article on troubleshooting OLE in Win2k:

OLEXP: How to Troubleshoot Outlook Express in Windows 2000

Take Care,

Richard

[Flybywyre]

I've tried this using the link that Richard posted to OLEXP Windows 98 upgrade. Everything goes fine until I go to open the file in the newly created folder when I get the following error message:
No messages can be found in this folder or another application is running that has the required files open.
Please select another folder or try closing applications that may have files open.
I tried closing the search programme that was still open but to no result and I have used the same process on two computers both of which come up with the same error message.
Anyone had the same problems or got any ideas ?
Regards
FBW

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Flybywyre,

Then it could be that all the emails were deleted in the upgrade. You should just restore from your last backup.

Take Care,

Richard

[Flybywyre]

The Emails were there but I was unable to open them until I came across this great programme that was able to restore Emails that I had deleted some 3 years ago after at least two OS upgrades.............
http://www.mailnavigator.com/
I didn't need them, just experimenting as I recently upgraded a friends system from 98SE to XP pro. Unfortunately it didn't save the OE folders (it normally does) which contained some three years of Emails that she had been saving.
I really need to get them back and I couldn't believe my luck that this thread was running on the day that I did the upgrade.
Regards
FBW

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Flybywyre,

Nice little program. That will come in handy to people doing upgrades.

Take Care,

Richard