"This article describes how to recover a Windows XP system that does not start because of corruption in the registry. This procedure does not guarantee full recovery of the system to a previous state; however, you should be able to recover data when you use this procedure. "
Specifically, Advanced Format is going to bring about some issues where older operating systems (and we're looking almost exclusively at Windows XP here) will inadvertently harm drive performance by making certain assumptions about the drives that will no longer be true.
Reinstalling Windows XP is painful enough, but it becomes a real hassle if you have a system originally built by a large OEM and you can't find the original disks that came with it.
# Creates a virtual encrypted disk within a file and mounts it as a real disk.
# Encrypts an entire partition or storage device (such as USB flash drive).
# Encrypts a partition of Windows is installed (pre-boot authentication).
# Encryption is automatic, real-time (on-the-fly) and transparent.
# Parallelization and pipelining allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted.