My MOBO crapped out on PII 400Mz system, pwr supply was the cause. Old 12G HD with 98SE has all my stuff. Am concerned about preserving all emails in outlook express. With prior windows reinstalls I lost all emails. New Athlon 2200+, asus a7v8x, 512 DDR arrives today. Got OEM WinXP the other day ready to install. Would appreciate suggestions on what to do. Will probably do a dual boot. Also have an ATA66 20GB spare HD I could use.

If all you want is to access your old data then put the new OS on the 20GB drive. Then put the 12GB drive on as slave. You will have a frech install and access to all you old data.

The easy way is to have two operating systems or just copy your essential Emails to xp drive while they are both connected. (primary XP/ secondary 98)

If you want to dual boot you will need to check this out. http://www.computing.net/howto/simple/addharddrive/ Problem here is you can't follow the procedure exactly since you have a new system. Hardware registry keys will be all wrong. Might be best to just copy off what you need and reinstall then bring back your outlook stuff.

All, Thanks so much for your help. My only quandary is that I have never been able to see where outlook stores the archived messages. In the past I have looked high and low. Previous info searches on this topic revealed that they are inaccessible. One solution given was to, while in Outlook, select message icons and copy to a separate folder. This did work, however when my mobo crapped out I had not done this for several months. Now, if I reinstall outlook with the OS(and I have a feeling it will not matter if it is to the new HDD or old)all the e-mails will be deleted. Much thanks for any suggestions.

I would just install the old HDD and boot it up with the new motherbd and cpu. When the system requires you to install new motherbd drivers let it install. Should work OK.

Outlook Express (OE) messages are stored in this directory C:\Windows\Application Data\Identities\. Under Identities there will be another sub-directory, I think it is unique to each individual, mine is {03FA7420-3FCC-11D3-A1EB-AF89CC02843C}. Then under there you will have "Microsoft" and finally "Outlook Express". The e-mails are located withing the .dbx files with the name of your particular Outlook Express folder (i.e., the messages in your in box are stored in Inbox.dbx, sent items in Sent Items.dbx, etc). So what you can do is copy those .dbx files to a safe location where they won't be overwritten. Then even if OE installs fresh, you can move the .dbx file(s) back to where it belongs (overwriting the default one OE will put there), and have all of your old e-mails.