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Recovering Outlook Contact Data

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by dumphrey

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I support several remote sales reps. Recently, one of our reps had to purchase a new laptop, as the mother board in his old one had finally died (5 yr old Toshiba, well used). He upgraded to a Dell Vostro with XP Pro. The problem now is how do I get all his old contacts off of the old hard drive and into outlook on the new laptop? Both computer have/had XP pro and Office 2003. Short of installing the HD in another computer, doing a "repair" install and exporting the contacts, what can I do? Currently his old hd (from the dead laptop) is in a usb caddy.

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by thumbsup2

If you can get access to the files of the old hard drive as an external drive (or slave) on the new computer, you can import the contacts/mail from the old PST file.

Open Outlook on the new computer and click File -> Import and Export -> Import from another program or file -> Personal Folder file (.pst) ... On the next screen, click the BROWSE button and navigate to the old hard drive into --EITHER-- (depending on your setup) c:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.pst --OR-- c:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\outlook.pst ..... then change the radio button below that field so it does not import duplicates and click NEXT. On the final screen, tell it to import into the same folders in the Personal Folders group. Click NEXT and it will complete the task.

If you can't locate the file, you may need to turn on hidden files for the old hard drive using Windows Explorer to navigate to the old drive and click Tools -> Folder Options -> View. Once hidden files are revealed and while you're there, check to see where that PST file is located for sure.

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