Some time ago, my company bought a second-hand LaCie Ethernet disk from another company that was going into liquidation. I've been asked to look into it, and I've found that machine has been formatted. After some preliminary reading, I was expecting Windows XP to be embedded in the disk.

If the machine was indeed formatted before sale (as opposed to just being faulty), did that completely remove the embedded Windows from it also? Is it possible to recover or reinstall Windows on this machine?