I am recovering data post a crash and have managed to view the 'crashed'
drive using a second drive with identical operating system.
The only thing that appears to be wrong is that the boot sector is corrupt
(after the BIOS screen I get black with flashing cursor in the top left hand
corner).

The only things (critical data to be recovered before formatting) I can't
find on the crashed drive are the Outlook Express emails.
Does anyone know where (and how) Outlook Express saves these and how I can
transfer them to disk to be replaced post the format?

Of course I'd much prefer to simply repair the boot sector but the dos
chkdsk followed by fixdisk commands failed to do so. Dell helpline, funnily
enough, suggested formatting the drive and re-installing.

Any ideas?

Jack