If the hard drive is still running and you have no backups, yes, it is possible to do some things that will bring it back, short of sending it off for “deep recovery services”. Unfortunately, Geek Squad and places like that won’t do that sort of work, using utilities such as Spinrite and such, just because it takes so much time.
Furthermore, although I’ve done all of those things and recovered things few would bother with, going that route can take days. Spinrite alone, if it appears that would be helpful, takes up to a day to do its full scan. Walking someone through this sort of stuff, even if it seems rather easy to me, is almost impossible over a forum. There are too many variables you just need to work around when they appear that might be apparent to me but not to you.
Honestly, if you have a backup as I believe you mentioned you did last year, this won’t be too bad. You’ll need to put the drive in and format it, but as long as your BIOS is set to automatically sense your hard drive, it should be okay. I assume your new drive uses the same cabling as your old one, so as long as that is true, you should be fine formatting it, putting XP on it, then your backup program, then restore from your backup. NOTE: Before formatting, disconnect your backup drive to assure you don’t accidentally format that instead.
I hope the best for you.
is there a special answer to which windows inatallation would you like to log onto?