Those e-mails and backing up.

Get the likes of Norton Ghost (I paid £9.99 from Amazon partner - Ghost 2003 the latest vers. compatible with Win98 )... does not require an OS present, Will if necessary load it's own dos environment from a floppy and run Ghost back up / restore, accessing backup media from that.
I back up whole 20GB disc (or partition) into an 11GB ghost file on second drive, takes just over 20 mins.
Restore the whole drive in about the same time..
Also
I can access that ghost file using 'Ghost explorer' - part of the Ghost suite - retrieving a single or group of files ... as easy as opening win file explorer .. a really useful tool ( To some extent - never again be stuck with a useless backup ! )

e-mails
That would have enabled someone , at his leisure, find the backed up *.dbx files eg.... Inbox.dbx etc

Copy them to his new drive in, say, a temp directory.

Open Outlook express <File> <import> <messages> Select prog -eg- OE6 .. radio button for 'From an OE6 store directory' Browse to his temp directory and go for it... all the old stuff would be shifted into the new OE6.
Before the disk change Under <tools> <accounts> he would also have exported his mail accounts to a safe place *.iaf files and his address book *.wab .. Then imported the lot into the new OExpress.. As if nothing unusual had occurred.
Just carried out that task from Win98 to XP sp2 .. All ok.

i never lost my emails, they are on a separate hd.

all i lost regarding emails was the blocked senders list

Corrected that.