I fix PCs for a living. This Question relates to a customers PC which I do not have access to while responders are addressing this question.
I have a tree on the customers PC that contains all of C: from another PC. The other PC ran Outlook. The PC in question runs Outlook Express. The job is to get the contacts from the old PC into the Outlook Express Address Book (excluding any fields that Outlook Contacts support and Outlook Express Address book does not support).
The essence of this is
(1) What is the full path name of the data file that Outlook stores the contacts in.
(2) How do we import the contacts from that file into Outlook Express.
Please note that Outlook does not run on the PC. The existence of the Outlook application file in the tree containing C: from the old PC is NOT the same as having Outlook installed on the PC and I hope that is clear to you.
And to install Outlook would cost over $200 as I would have to buy MS Office just to transfer the Contacts over and for no other reason. And even if Outlook was running, so what ??? If we exported the contacts from Outlook it would export the contacts in the installed Outlook, not the saved tree from the other PC, right? (i.e not the contacts from Outlook on the other PC).
Or if I take the HD out and mount it on my own PC which runs Outlook that saves the $200 but the technical problem remains EXACTLY the same as in the paragraph directly above this one.
Now to finish, I should clarify that I am not quite telling the truth above. The saved C: tree is from the SAME PC. The PC used to run Windows 98 or 98 SE and failed in some way and the file system was an older file system and someone installed Windows 2000 and the install automatically or some other way converted the entire C: tree from the older file system to the newer file system supported by Windows 2000 and saved it some where like C:\Saved-C or something. . It think it was FAT32 to NTFS or the other way around. It does NOT matter. For the purposes of this question that C: tree might as well have been from ANOTHER PC.
Because you can not go into Program Files in that saved tree and run an executable (i.e Outlook) and get it to run AND then export the contacts to a CSV file that Outlook Express could import. Because installing a program involves a lot more than having the exe file (and all the other files) in the Program files tree. There are registry entries that are not there and perhaps files in the Windows tree or the Documents and Settings tree for the account running Outlook that would have to be moved to the right place in a different operating system file system (98 or 98 SE to 2000).
Or course, if you can tell me EXACTLY HOW TO DO ALL THESE MOVES and get the OLD Outlook to run on the new Win 2000 OS so I can do the Export command, I am all ears. Otherwise the 3rd paragraph in this Question (that begins with "The essence of this is") IS what you need to respond to, right??
So, how do I do it? Otherwise a large database of a business's customers is lost forever!! The PC owner never used Outlook to send emails, only to store all her customer information, addresses, email addresses, contact names and phone numbers. She used AOL for actually sending email. Outlook was just a database program to her.
Regards,
Mike
