Congrats on getting your files back, everything looks really lovely. Hopefully you guys will have no further troubles and your inspiration comes and stays.
I do have some information that may give some insight: Windows looks at different sectors that appear to be early in the drive, if these fail windows will either slow down, disconnect or fail to read a medium. If it was the os drive the os component may have just gone bad. From both of these the drive may be read with a usb reader and pull the uncorrupted files. Or it could have just been a driver/hardware error that disappears after a few weeks.