Unable to boot windows

My brother's home was recently hit by lightning (indirectly) :eek and killed a router, couple game consoles, a flat screen T.V., and his pc. :cry I brought his hard drive home with me to put into a spare rig I already had running, but I am having one helluva time getting it to boot up. :banghead

Here is what I have tried so far:
Connected as slave; good there
ran autofix from disk; FAILED-- Unable to automatically reapair :crap
Ran chkdsk /r from disk; seems ok
ran bootrec.exe rebuilt bcd; successful

It starts to show the windows logo with scrolling bar and before it can even begin to scroll, the pc reboots. :cry

Any ideas before I :guns this damn thing?

 

Put it back in as slave and try repartitioning and reformatting it. It might be OK.

 

Reformatting is a last option. I want to try to get it back up and running with current documents and settings. If it were mine, I would just save any files I wanted to keep and reformat the whole thing, but this is my brother's and he has pictures and documents all over the place. Not to mention that my neice knows more about computers than he does and she's 4! roflmao

 

Or even an external on a windows pc, no need for linux just to go through the files

 

Could you elaborate as to why I shouldn't try to boot into windows? And your meaning of "live CD".

 

Not the answer I was looking for but thanks for the help. I know the HDD is ok. I can access the files and see all the pics and docs on it. I just dont know what to save. I will have to try and find a program that can save all my files and settings. Then Ill reformat the whole drive.

 

Ok thanks for the help...

Now I guess I need to find a program to locate all the files and folders... Got any suggestions?

 

My 2 cents worth: Why not just install the drive into his machine as a second drive and install windows onto a new bootable drive. That way, he can access all his folders and files in his own time.

 

Yes, but I'm assuming here that the man's brother is going to get another computer to replace the zapped machine.

 

Yes I have a spare PC that I am installing the drive in for my brother.

I think the best option is to save the info (C:\user\"CIBER") to the desktop. He can go through the files when he gets a chance. Although I will probably have to walk him through it :-D ...

Thanks for all the help. I really appreciate it...