Come on people, format his hard drive, system restore. The man wants his lost information back and both of these options will erase any hope of that. What you need is a hard drive recovery software. There are some free ones out there and some that cost. I've had just as much luck with the free ones as I have the money ones.
Just google recover deleted files from my hard drive.
you should get some proggies like this one.. this one is a good one by the way.
http://www.pctools.com/file-recover/...FRdinAodkCP7Pw
Good luck and I hope you get your files back..And don't take your computer to IBM they will screw you over on price..A decent mom&pop type computer shop should have a data recovery software if you opt to go that route and they wont charge you a fortune to do it..