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How to recover saved mail after HD swap? & Anyway to boot off of a USB external?

lavrishevo

lavrishevo

macrumors 68000
Original poster
When I upgraded my hard drive I took my old 120 5400 and stuck in a case and now I use it as a backup. I left the whole system on there which was Leopard upgraded from Tiger. What I am trying to do is get all my e-mail I stored on that drive, or rather all the e-mail that was left in the folders I created inside Mail. When I open the app from the external it boots the Mail app from my internal. I tried looking through the package contents of the external HD Mail app for some clue but could not come up with anything. Anyone know how I can gain access to the e-mail from Mail app on the external?

And

I really wanted to boot from my external to do certain processes to my internal which cannot be mounted for me to do this. I have had no luck booting from an external USB and from what I have read it can not be done because the USB drivers have to be loaded via software not hardware. I can boot from firewire I believe. I just want to confirm this. I was not able to find a firewire case that would fit the MBP drive here in Puerto Rico so I settled for the one case Comp USA had that would fit and was USB. Anyway, any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
Not sure if I follow you correctly, but from your post seems that you have access to your old HD, if that is the case you can use the import Mailbox feature in Mail.app (File -> Import mailboxes) just point it to the location you have your old mail, typically in ~/Users/yourusername/Library/Mail :apple:
 
On your second question, Intel Macs are supposed to be bootable from a USB2 volume, assuming the partition scheme is correct and the OS install is bootable. I haven't tried it myself, and it doesn't sound like it's working for you (have you tried holding down the option key at start with the USB drive connected?), but I've read in a number of places about it working.

As for your mail problem, do what nemex said. It sounds like you're mistakenly assuming that the particular Mail.app you launch somehow decides where to get your mail. It doesn't. The mail is stored in the Library of the current user, and any Mail.app that is launched will always look there, so you need to either import or manually copy the data from the old user's folder to the current one.
 
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