If you don't know please say so..

[betaman]

Contacts WLM 2011 import from dead Dell survivor drive

Here is an issue that has been danced around and never addressed as far as I can see. My scenario is: Customer's PC died. I have a good hard drive that had Windows Live Mail 2011 (in Windows XP SP3) working fine til death (of their Dell) did it part. I now have a new PC with Windows Live Mail (in Windows 7 Home Premium) I have easily restored all messages with the import feature but how in the H E double hockey sticks do you get those old contacts from the piggy-backed Dell hard drive to export to CSV or import into the new WLM 2011? Remember I cannot run the old WLM 2011 it is just a data drive at this point.

 

[derekimo]

OK, I don't know.....but I did find this,

Import, export, or change the format for contacts

 

[sandman]

Windows Live Mail – Contacts Database « The Field Guide


See if any of this info helps i usually have mine backed up from time to time so i always have a backup of my contacts but in your case if the drive and programs are intact might try just running WLM from the icon within the program files on that old drive it might work. I haven't used WLM in a while so thats why I check Google
out for some answers see if it helps.

 

[betaman]

to derekimo: Your solution will only work with a running WLM 2011 using its built-in Export features. My drive is just a data drive left over from a Michael Dell experiment gone badly wrong Thanks for trying.

 

[betaman]

to sandman: Your link "tears the cover off" and explains some technical options. I am exploring an idea. Maybe I can copy the entire Contacts folder (found in the 15.4 folder) and change the long hexadecimal number that is now pointing to the new empty contacts.edb to the old one containing all the good contacts with some clever Registry edits?

 

[roncerr]

Have you asked the customer if he was signing in (manually or automatically)? If he always signed in, his contacts are duplicated at the website contacts.live.com and will be visible in WLM the next time he signs in.

I have done some experiments with WLM 2009 and found that the contents of the appdata/local/Microsoft/Windows Live Contacts folder can be removed and restored. Windows Explorer keeps asking whether you really want to do this during the restore process but I found that if you keep saying "yes" the contacts will eventually be restored. Can't hurt to try and see what will happen in your case since the new install will have no contacts to begin with.