Just noticed danmpen above. Thanks Dan. If you even know of some utilities that can get him into the NTFS partition if that's what his drive was formatted for....
I'm not sure I understand the question. If his drive is formatted for NTFS, then Vista should read it and get into it just fine.
At least I've run into the issue before that if you're not logged into a specific account on a machine with NTFS that you only have access to your user account folder under Documents and Settings and none of the others.