That platter was remarkably intact. You can send broken drives like this to a company. They can recover most of the data. NSA could do it too. If you don't overwrite several times with a random pattern it is recoverable.

Also that drive is old and I am suspicious that is the only copy, or that the novels we're there anyway. Seems likely Pratchett destroyed them already and this was symbolic.

By the time we get the technology to do that, we could probably build an AI pratchett that generates great works perfectly within his style and quality. Like that black mirror episode but slightly less creepy.

Ooh, I wonder what would happen if someone fed all of Pratchett's books into a RNN?

Would it generate new Discworld stories, or would it rip a portal into the Dungeon Dimensions releasing the eldritch horrors that dwell within?

It would produce superficially Pratchett-sounding prose with no coherent plot.

Presumably, the RNN would be deep enough to recognize that "a coherent plot" is a component of the work on which it's being trained and which it must generate. But not so deep that it generates eldritch horrors.

That would be a fantastically deep network. Current AI can sometimes keep track of what's going on until the end of the paragraph. A novel's worth of threads to track is simply too much for the naive toss-it-in-a-wood-chipper approach.