move to new hd gnus problems

[Paul Martinelli <pymartinelli@yahoo.ca>]

I've successfully moved all my home directory to a new hard drive, except for 
Gnus.  Part of the problem probably stems from the ill-conceived procedure I 
used in the middle of an emergency yesterday.  I had upgraded my hard drive 
where my home directory was to a larger one (hdb1).  This hard drive mounts 
on /home in another hard drive where the root directory is (hda1).  So I 
proceeded by first copying all the contents of the old hard drive 
to /usr/local/<username> in hda1.  I then removed the old hard drive, installed 
and mounted the new one in the same manner as the old one, and copied 
everything from hda1 back to the newly installed hdb1. 
 
Everything I've checked so far works as before, but Gnus is showing only newly 
arrived mail and old mail is not even shown.  All my news and mail groups are 
there, and everything is intact in the newsgroups.  It's only the old mail that 
doesn't seem to be read.  I've also checked that all the mark files are being 
completely deleted at Gnus startup, although the messages themselves are 
untouched in their original places. 
 
These are the relevant parts of ~/.gnus.el: 
 
(add-to-list 'gnus-secondary-select-methods 
	     '(nnmaildir "" (directory "~/News/.nnmaildir") 
			 (get-new-mail t))) 
 
(setq mail-sources '((file :path "/var/mail/<username>"))) 
 
and, as always, I have fetchmail fetch all my mail and put it in the indicated 
spool file. 
 
Any ideas to help me get back my old mail, marks and scores would be very much 
appreciated! 
 
Paul