I was thinking the same question. Do you mean wiped out his hard drive along the lines of a virus, windows failure or possibly hacked? Or was the drive actually reformatted? Wiping the hd implies that it was reformated and shouldn't have any directories. Have you tried using the bootdisk to boot into safemode or run dos diagnostics?? The more information you can supply the easier it is for people to help you, I learned that this summer