You bought a new drive and - presumably - installed XP on it and OE doesn't
work? What's it not doing, should be no problem whatsoever.
CY: The OE won't work on the old internet explorer, and the old IE won't
do updates or much else on the web.


Had you not formated your old drive you could have easily gotten all your
stuff - including the emails - off of it. Too late now, gone
forever...unless you are willing to spend Big Bucks with a data recovery
service.
CY: No got big bucks. No got recovery programs.


For those emails which you still have and which Thunderbird can't read,
Thunderbird can certainly read them if they are in the form of discrete
files (*.eml); i.e., not all jammed into a MS dbx file.

CY: I did save the dbx files from OE. But,t hat's not much help?

If they are, TB
can import them if both it and OE are on the same computer; if not, there
are third party programs that will extract them from the *dbx and save them
as *.eml which can then be imported or read by TB.
CY: Oops.


Personally, I dislike TB. I recently bought a laptop with Winn8, tried at
least a dozen email programs trying to find one that would do what OE does
and as easily. I found none. I finally set up a virtual machine, installed
XP on it and am now using OE again.


CY: Lucky you.