Okay my laptop is starting to crawl and has loads of unnessery detrus and bollocks on it's hard drive so i wish to use the good old recory CD BUT i want to keep some things like my History and favorites in Internet explorer, outlook express address book passwords for site like this one and anything else out there that might be useful.

So could some one with more knowledge than me tell me what bits to copy across to my desktop and then reinstate after the recovery.


Many thanks to the clever people

That's a very complicated subject, as each of those programs will store their data in a different way.

Doing a re-install of an OS is a great way to speed up your system, but migration of your previous information is a difficult and complex procedure.

There are some third-party tools which can help you in the migration. Does anyone have links to these?

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Tony Fabris

Look here. I used it once to migrate internet explorer stuff and outlook stuff to a new system.
Also you could use TweakUI to look at the maps where the most important personal files are stored on your system.
I recommend keeping the old partition in place or make an image of it by ie. using Ghost. If there's anything you missed after the reinstall, you can still easily retrieve it. For a Win9x platform you should beforehand boot into DOS and rename the progra~1 and windows to *.old Then you can start with the reinstall.
Hope this helps in some way, I know it's a pain to do this, good luck!

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Edwin de Vaan

ermm, yes this possible by just backing up the relevant directories, but it does depend on what Windows release you are using. look below....

Windows95/98/98SE/ME/NT4.0
Backup the following directories...
\windows\all users
\windows\application data
\windows\local settings
\windows\profiles
\windows\favorites
\windows\temporary internet files (IE)
\windows\desktop
\windows\offline web pages
\my documents
ANY *.PST (Outlook Email store), *.PAB (Outlook personal address book), *.WAB (Windows address book) Files

Make sure you set the view options in Explorer to show all hidden, system files. Backing up these directory will include some directories below it with data in it, ie.
\windows\local settings, will have ..\appication data, ..\microsoft, ..\identities (outlook express emails)...etc...
your passwors etc for website is mostly kept in cookies, which also would be included in these directories, i.e.
..\temporary internet files.

Windows 2000/XP
\Documents & Settings
ANY *.PST (Outlook Email store), *.PAB (Outlook personal address book), *.WAB (Windows address book) Files

this directory basically keeps everything for each user, just as it's name states.

To restore this data, for emails, you need to import the data back in via the import/export filters, if you just dump the whole directory and start outlook express it will fail, since outlook exp creates a special registry entry, hence the ..\identities\REAL LONG REGISTRY KEY\outlook express...
directory structure. Also OE will fail if it encounters a mail database which has a differening encryption cipher i.e. 48bit vs 128bit.
For favourites and cookies etc, you just need to copy them into your profiles folder, for which ever user is logged in ,
ie, if you don't login to your computer, its mainly just kept in..
\windows\favorties, but if you use a login name, and each user has different settings (user profiles) etc... to enter windows at startup it'd be in......\windows\profiles\*UESRNAME*\Favorites
same goes for Windows2000/XP but you'd start at \Documents and Settings\*USERNAME*\favorites etc...