XP home doesn't suck. It's just a crippled version of XP Professional. They are about 90% the same.
Sounds like you need to reinstall all of your drivers. Your laptop should have came with a disk that contained the drivers. You can probably also download them from the manufacturers website.
If you have XP professional or the original system-recovery disks, I'd just use them.
The drive could have been formatted. But you would have had to boot from a floppy to do it.
RIP BigJim33 & GearedUp: You are sorely missed my friends.
Hindsight is always 20/20. But looking back it's still a bit fuzzy.