Looking for some desparate ideas

[Alma J Wetzker]

I got a call today from a neighbor.  He is self-employed and a pretty 
smart fellow.  About a year ago he got malwared on his WinME business 
system, so he reformatted and reinstalled everything.  Now he needs to 
access some data from before the reformat.  Is there any way to get that 
data back?  Everything that I know tells me that it is gone forever.

The only problem with that is that it is the IRS asking for the data.

     -- Alma