Problems moving Live Mail accounts, contacts and email

After the desktop computer I was using until a couple of weeks ago crashed (permanently), I bought a new computer (AMD quad chip, Windows 7 64 bit). I put the main hard drive from the old computer into a case, and was able to connect it by USB to my new computer to save my data (I copied the libraries onto the new computer), but have not been able to find out how to rescue my Live Mail account information, contacts, message rules and saved or unread emails. Any article I find talks about first exporting the information, but since the hard drive that version of Live Mail is on is no longer bootable, I have no way to export the data. If I can find where to locate it, I would like to be able to copy the files into the new computer, replacing whatever files would be set up when I first start Live Mail. The old computer was Windows 7 32 bit. Any help with this would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Larry

Were you signing in to WLM on the old computer? If so, your contacts are at the website contacts.live.com and will be imported into the new program when you sign in. They should also be here for 2011:C:\Users\<windows username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live\Contacts; (in 2009/2010 the sub-folder under Microsoft is "Windows Live Contacts").

The message store folder is along a similar path ending in "Windows Live Mail".

You could try dragging and dropping the contents of the old folders into the new. I've done this only with contacts to see if it would work for the not-signed-in case. It worked for me in 2009/2010 but in the process I had to answer a lot of prompts with "try again" or "yes" since WLM wants to be sure you really want to do this. BTW, the folders may look empty but that's only beause they are hidden by default; they can be dragged even if not visible by selecting everything in the right pane of the Explorer window showing the folder's contents.

The messages may work the same way. If not you can make them visible by changing the folder/view option to not "hide protected operating system files". Create new folders in Windows Explorer to keep your groups of *.eml files, then use WLM's import messages feature to navigate to each folder separately and bring it's contents in to WLM.

As for the accounts and message rules, I usually just set that up from scratch myself even though there is an export/import process for that which doesn't apply in your case anyway.