he wiped it once through the xp setup.
Great! Then this should be simple.
Try pulling the drive and putting into an enclosure, hook up to your PC(hope you have something like F-prot for protection) and see what you find.
If not, use Disk Recovery. I think it’s $99 bucks but it does work and you can mark the files you want by extension such as xls, doc, jpg, etc.
When I used it 4 years ago, I just grabbed everything and handed it back to a friend on his drive with a back up to an extra drive I had laying around.
He paid for everything and bought me an excellent bottle of cognac, Kelt, for my work.
Told him to back up once a week, at least and you should be fine or you can buy a product by “cute” that does it automatically and is way better than Microsuck.
These days I keep my back ups to a couple of SD’s as they hold all my work just fine. This way I can always whip one out if my laptop takes a dump and put them in another computer and keep on trucking.
The other thing I have done that really makes all this foolproof, mostly, is have everything loaded on Microsoft Virtual PC. It is just an image and I keep two copies of my work, in this way.
With VPC the OS and all the files are just one image instead of a million little files. If I can get to another PC and install VPC, Boom! I am totally an completely back in business with all my software, personal settings and work files.
What I’ve done is keep a copy of the install for VPC on a flash and I backup the VPC drive I typically work with.
Spun hard drive? Argh! But, get another PC and I am back up in less than 1 hour with everything. I am carrying around my hard drive.
I have this on two seperate Flash that are stored in seperate places.
EMC also makes an excellent product that does the same thing only better, of course and is not such a memory hog. I believe it costs around $120 and one day I am going to convert to that.