Update on our computer problems:
Yesterday I went out and bought a new hard drive and a hard drive enclosure, as mentioned in one of the comments to the previous post.
Removing the old hard drive and installing the new one turned out to be easy - it took longer to figure out how to get the case open and clean out the dust than to swap out the drive. Unfortunately, I then ran into a new problem. The new drive formatted fine and then when installing WinXP I got an error in the install.
Guess which was more useful in figuring out the cause of the error:
A) A call to Microsoft technical support.
B) A Google search on the error message.
If you said B, you win the cookie.
The net result is that there is probably a problem with the WinXP CD I was using - I'll be trying again with a different CD.
On the other front, I took the old drive and put it in the USB hard drive enclosure, which is just a device that you can put an internet hard drive into, connect the cable and power supply, and then you can plug it in to a USB port as an external drive. These hard drive enclosures are the neatest little devices since the bread slicer. I connected the old hard drive up on another computer and I'm running data recovery software on it. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to recover some or all of the data.
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