Just wanted to wrap this up by saying that I was able to boot linux mint cd, force the drive to mount and copy most of the pictures and more importantly the data files for the business off to a usb thumb drive. Some of the pictures he had on there were corrupt along with a couple other random word files of not huge importance.

After data was recovered I attempted to format and reinstall windows, after it got done marking the bad sections about half of the total 40 gig's of space was unusable. New hard drive on order, and new knowledge gained.

On a side note now the boss man knows the importance of BACK-UPS.