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.
he wiped it once through the xp setup.