Recover lost Coins

On a corrupted HDD. What do you mean by that? Was it formatted, re-formatted, converted, or is it in RAW? Was he using a desktop wallet? I mean, if he has the time and money he could have it swapped and cloned, but there is still no guarantee the wallet will be able to launch. There's a chance for grabbing files individually and rebuilding the app to run again, but manual installations suck if you're using windows.

At the end of the day, he may be shit out of luck, unfortunately.