Restoring a laptop hard drive using reinstallbackups?

My Toshiba Satellite 1905-303 laptop gave out a year or so ago & we bought a replacement desk top. I've since re-formatted the drive which worked fine as a filestore using a caddy with usb cord. However, I've now discovered some original Toshiba XP recovery disks that came with the machine & a CDROM of a reinstallbackups directory that was done fairly close to when it ceased to work. The disk doesn't seem to function in the laptop when I refit it, so I can't get anything on the screen. Can I recover the disk using a separate machine so that I can then refit it & get XP up & running on it, & if so how?