Data Recovery

After.

When your computer deletes stuff, it doesn't actually remove it from the hard drive. It just tells the operating system that those bits on the hard drive no longer represent a file on your system. So, the longer that she uses the computer, the higher the probability that critical bits will be overwritten leading to data destruction.

See, that's the thing. I'm sure the data was wiped out via the set-up process (Press D to delete partition or something like that during windows XP installation), during which I doubt any operating system is running. I'm speaking from ignorance, though, so I hope it's possible.

And it was downgraded from Vista to XP, if that matters.