You could potentially remove the hard drive from that computer, then put it in an external casing and hook it up to a new computer. Then research software to pull messages out of your old backups. You could potentially still salvage the messages, it sounded like they were old ones
If you can recover the iPhone backup files that iTunes created from the hard drive (such as via an external enclosure like unepipe mentions), you should be able to recover the messages contained within. Messages are stored in a SQLite DB within the backup (this is how jwz's script reads them).
Looks like iTunes on XP stores backups at this path: \Documents and Settings\(username)\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\. That's the directory you need to recover from the hard drive.
Somehow I never considered this. Linux on my second partition actually boots up, so I can use my Linux OS to grab the files I believe. Thanks! I'll give it a shot!
