Sorry to hear of your loss, I just hope you not blaming xp entirely.....if its a Fujistu, IBM, Seagate or WD. Its like the the drive if formatted a few years ago, probably degraded...the older Maxtors are the only ones we found that seem to survive storage for any length of time. Not forgetting the cheap caps and dodgy drive controllers these types of drive had. We at one count nearly 2000 dead drives hanging around to be destroyed that all failed well inside their MTBF and many just stock drives were DOA even before we put them inside a pc. Early to Mid Naughty's PATA and early SATA drives have not been the best advert for the above companies and their management of OEM drive failures nor picking up the mess afterwards.
Unfortunately keeping data on Magnetic storage devices hasn't proved the best method in recent years. To TBH unless its retained in RAID or RAID + Tape the chances are data more that 10 years old is at risk. Even wonder storage like DAT,DLT,LTO1-4,MO, DVD, CD and other tape haven't faired well. The only thing that seems to work is "Storage Refresh" and Migrate every 18-24 months or so. Our earliest still accessible data is now 25 years old due to its storage migrations and we are obliged to retain it for 75 years. Edit:yes we still have Databases from the days of Ashton Tate knocking about and even the record data from VMS/PDP11, VMS Mumps is still alive and well, Mckesson PAS is still the main stay of patient records.
