hard drive recovery

A friend of mine set me to work on a drive that stopped booting. I set the drive to slave and installed it in my work station. It looks like the entire drive has been wiped some how.

I could use a data recovery tool to bring back all the files, but what I'd really like to do is completely restore the drive to its previous status. The point being that I wouldn't have to reinstall the OS or any of the programs that she has.

How would I go about doing such a thing? Do I need something that will reconstruct the partition table? The registry? The file structure?

 

If the entire drive has been wiped....what is your plan to recover all the data?

 

I don't have one, that is what I'm asking about.