[Koen]

My old laptop died but I have access to the hardrive. I did not have a contacts export file generated by outlook on this dead laptop. What do I need to do to be able to recover the contact/calendar data and migrate them to Outlook 2010 on my new computer?

Koen

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Unless you can get Outlook to run on your old laptop, I fear you may not be able to retrieve your data from it.
The 'Export' function for Outlook data works within Outlook itself, which means you need to open Outlook first.
That's why it's important to keep exported data saved on a regular basis to an external drive, even when everything is working okay.

I know of no other way to retrieve Outlook data from a 'dead' machine, unless you can install the drive on to another PC and boot into the copy of Windows that's on it, so that you can open the 'Old' Outlook and export it's data. That would largely depend on which version of Windows is on it. Windows XP & Vista do not like being "moved" to different hardware and almost always refuse to run in those circumstances.

[phillipcorcoran]

Unless you can get Outlook to run on your old laptop, I fear you may not be able to retrieve your data from it.
The 'Export' function for Outlook data works within Outlook itself, which means you need to open Outlook first.
That's why it's important to keep exported data saved on a regular basis to an external drive, even when everything is working okay.

I know of no other way to retrieve Outlook data from a 'dead' machine, unless you can install the drive on to another PC and boot into the copy of Windows that's on it, so that you can open the 'Old' Outlook and export it's data. That would largely depend on which version of Windows is on it. Windows XP & Vista do not like being "moved" to different hardware and almost always refuse to run in those circumstances.

[Koen]

For Future Reference:

Actually, between my techie son and believe it or not microsoft's site, Outlook 2010 let's you import outlook *.pst files directly.

Since the old op sys was XP, I was unable to launch the old outlook from the old drive.
I was however able to located the old Outlook "outlook.pst" file which resided at:

Documents and settings/user name/local settings/application data/microsoft/outlook folder (enable folders to view hidden files)

In Outlook 2010 you then click file, open, import, select "import from another program or file", select outlook data file (.pst) and browse for file location

Koen