Read this whole thing...
your computer guy is a tard. I've never heard of windows ever reinstalling itself or self-repairing. Despite that m$ and security shouldn't be used in the same sentence, NO os, not even BeOS ever performs a self-repair to that extent.
Do yourself a HUGE favor, tear the hard drive out, stick it in a friends machine as a slave drive, go grab yourself the demo of
Symantec Ghost (or livestate), install it on the other machine, and make metal level duplicate of the disk so you have it backed up somewhere.
Then, get yourself a copy of a live boot linux/bsd distro cd like
knoppix live boot or any one of these
rescue cds. Whatever you pick, make sure it has NTFS read support in it and NO write support.
Boot with the live cd in, mount the dead drive as readonly (if it's ntfs, write support's prolly not there anyway), and the drive to write the recoverable data onto. Run your recovery tool. There are honestly so many that it won't help for me to sit here and run down a bit ass list.
If you don't want to do that with the live boot cd, try some other symantec recovery programs. There are a number of them on trialware. Just make sure the drive you're recovering ISN'T the startup disk.
If you're willing to pay for shipping back and forth, I'll do whatever I can for you. I'm pretty trustworthy so you can go ahead and ask anyone here.
The ONLY way you would've lost ALL your data would be if Windows rewrote the NTFS drive format through either a format or a conversion. The convert to NTFS format is horrible in windows.
On a side note, check C:\Documents And Settings.
It MAY be that Windows found something wrong w/your home directory or user name and recreated your exact user name. Despite having the same username, you won't have the same home folder. For instance, if my login name is FOOBAR and I go ahead and install Windows again and make another name FOOBAR without reformatting, Windows will make my home folder FOOBAR.0000 or something along those lines. The FOOBAR directory is still there, but b/c Windows saw the directory existed, it didn't want to try to do a permission/user merge and instead did the smart thing and opted for a clean user creation.
Follow?
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2 billion dollars...sir, I'd handle my grandpa's balls for 2 billion dollars.