Mailbox backup/restore question?

[flyinraptr]

Was running Zimbra OSS 5.02 on Ubuntu 7.10 server - just a handful of mailboxes. Long story short the cpu/motherboard on the server fried - drives appear to be ok. In addition, I had taken a full backup (using the Zimbra backup script) a few days earlier. Obtained new server hardware - went through the process detailed here about - fresh install | remove Zimbra directory | copy over the former installation etc. The Zimbra installation at this point appears to be half-baked - looks like the MTA comes up (I can connect to it with Evolution client) but unable to hit the :7071/ZimbraAdmin console .... additionally when I try to use CLI - with su - Zimbra - I can't authenticate using what was suppose to be the Admin password. So I can't tell what the actual status is ......

Was wondering if this would be possible - take a backup of just the mailboxes - uninstall Zimbra completely - perform a fresh install - manually create the handful of mailboxes (using the identical names) - then perform a restore of the mailboxes? Not worried about calendar events, contacts - just recovering the mail itself.

Thanks for your help -

[flyinraptr]

Well I figured out a workaround ..... the new server had 2 SATA drives (the original server was on an IDE drive) was able to rsync the entire contents of the ide drive onto one of the SATA drives - with a little tweaking was able to get it to boot up - the original Zimbra installation appears to be ok. I am able to authenticate as the Zimbra user and execute CLI commands.