Well, sometimes having your backup doesn't help. I have run onto a similar problem, my Windows XP machine died and I have the hard drive (and backups), but I haven't been able to get it into a machine to bring it back up. I would prefer to stay with XP for that disk, since users that I program for still use only XP on their network [I do have other computers with Windows Vista and 7 on them]. The disk was IDE (I guess now PATA), and all the new systems only use SATA drives. I did get a clone onto a SATA disk, and tried to bring it up with an unused copy of XT (with SP 2), but apparently the new computer (which came with Windows 7) needs drivers that aren't on the XP disk. I'm still looking for a system I can bring the disk up in. And yes, I can read from the disk (and the clone), but that isn't helping.

First computer I used was a DEC PDP-10 programmed by punched cards, later with teletype. Then a PDP-8E which had 8K of memory, I was ecstatic when I upgraded it to 12K. First computer I owned was a Cromemco Z-80 with 64K of memory and 8" floppy disks (and at work I was still using my 12K of memory).