Well, if he REALLY knew what he was doing, he could have re-cracked it and kept everything exactly as-is but tech guys (in the laptop repair parts of chain stores and stuff) usually use Linux to recover data from bad Windows installs. Make no mistake; losing data completely is very difficult to do. A corrupt header file can be rebuilt, pointers re-assigned; it isn't easy but there's almost always a way. It might takes days of of talented programming in C or Assembly language (or worse, machine code *shudder*) but it can be done.
Windows bugs are usually fairly easy to get around, though. You need to remember that Windows is just a program, like a game or Word or whatever and while it can remove data (to an extent) if you tell it to, it's almost impossible for it to remove your files on its own (it can corrupt them, or its own files but not irreparably so most of the time). It's what a lot of us use to MANAGE our files, but it is not the only way to do so and just because Windows has broken, or in this case is working exactly as it should be, doesn't mean that your files are inaccessible.
Anyway, that's probably enough of this thread-jacking. How goes the hunt for a designer?