Lost OE6 folder & email contents

While printing Acrobat attachment in Outlook Express 6 from my Inbox, received an error message and had to reboot. Now all my email in Inbox and its sub-folders & contents is gone. All other folders & their contents remain. Have searched this forum & am confused about what I should do and which is the easiest method to get back the email. Have located the folders in Win98 under C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Identities\{B48...........}\Microsoft\Outlook Express.
The simplest suggestion on this board was to open Outlook Express, chose File, then Import ..... would this work in this situation? Don't want to do wrong thing & lose all email for good.
Other previous posts suggested this:
QUOTE
If the folders are there, OE has lost track of them. I would try this:
With OE closed, move the existing folders to a different location.
In OE, recreate the folders and close OE.
In WE, find the new *.dbx files, delete them and put the old ones back.END QUOTE
And another post recommended using DBXtract.
Could someone please recommend the easiest and safest way to get my files back after a crash?

 

steelwool--I think either of those methods will work (if you understand the rather brief description of the second).
To guard again losing things for good, perhaps make a copy of the folder containing all those files first. Then work on either set, but keep the other as your backup, just in case. I guess you only need to import the Inbox.
For the future, this article may be of interest
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/270/6/70.ASP

 

I copied dbx files into new directory. Used import in OE6 to import the copied Inbox.dbx. Get message, Your data was successfully imported into OE6, but the emails messages are still not there. Also tried importing the original emails in the original stored directory under Identities, but get the message that Another application is running that has the required files open...try closing application that may have file open. I also now have two inbox files: Inbox.dbx and Inbox(1).dbx (new emails received since lost previous inbox messages). Would anyone please know if there is any other way to retrieve the lost emails other than using the program Dbxtract as that method sounds like it could be complex.