Back up, I recommend Norton Ghost.
Security, I recommend Online Armor++, but it's a pay to play for the full versinon.
It goes without saying,
Place the drive in an external enclosure. I have used ‘recovermyfiles’ software before to recover pictures from a reformatted computer (thankfully they chose the quick format option), but I've never seen it actually recover files from a system that was formatted in a more systematic manner.
It's almost all gone now. The installation of Windows will have overwritten some large number of files (some of the old Windows and some of various other files). There may still be files left (formatting, depending on how he did it, only zeros out the FAT/NTFS table and doesn't overwrite the original file), but he'd better hope he had a defragmented hard drive, or the pieces of the files left won't be able to be strung back together.
If interested, I can go look up options, but this is not likely to bring back much at all. It will require software that reads the sectors and rebuilds what files it can.
You say he wiped it? How many times?
3 or more? Forget it, to much effort and you may have to send the drive out to professional that uses a combination of equipment and software. Very Expensive.
Just a reinstall? Try Disk Recovery, I had to use it once on a drive I spun and worked great.
Helped another friend who deleted files and got almost everything he was looking for back.
The important thing is to take the drive out ASAP and stop writing to it, which you do every time you turn on the computer.
Drop it into an enclosure and hook up to your PC. You may even still many of the files he needs without resorting to fancy software.
If you don’t see the files and can’t do a simple search on the drive then go to Fry’s and ask their “fake” experts about recovery options.
They sell complete kits with enclosure, cable, software, etc.
Gonna cost a couple hundred bucks no mater what though and that is the minimum.
If he absolutely has to have the files, take a small loan and you can get them, provided he didn’t de-mil. LOL, he probably didn’t and was just installing over his previous OS, so the files should be there using the option above.
Look in Documents and Settings for user accounts. Each user account you see will have Documents intact.
I don't think you'll find these old user accounts, if they exist, other than by looking in Documents and Settings.
Can’t help you recover. However, recently I used a product called DRIVE SCRUBBER. It actually works! My friend’s old PC had given up the ghost. Nothing to lose. Boat anchor time. I got this disc for $20 @ Best B. It advertises “approved by Dept. of Defense.”
I ran it twice. Took 2.3 hours first time. 1.5 second sweep.
Then re-loaded WIN Home Xp and all updates. Firefox, etc. now it rocks, and only 512MB memory.
No idea how I would recover old data from this hard drive. Product says it wipes clean all banking info, passwords, programs,etc. And to use it before donating PC to church, school, shelters, etc.
Anyway, GOOD LUCK!
Find and data recovery tool. I use this, it’s ease and does work.
http://www.any-data-recovery.com