It sounds like he got into this situation by calling up and trusted customer support and doing what any normal consumer does: then calling the fixup guy who is supposed to do this stuff professionally.
They said to make a backup and everything would work. He made a backup and it didn't work. From there, everything got worse.
I know that is pretty much the opposite of what I, an undoubtedly overzealous "technology guy", would try to do. Though, as a technology guy I probably would have said "Fuck it, lets install linux" not even halfway through the trouble he was having (and if it were still 2003 and the linux distro I was trying to install were Gentoo, the effort required between the two probably would have just about evened out).
Sticking with it and trying to work with customer service is a very "normal trusting consumer" thing to do.
Some friends of mine who are professionals in other fields have noted (not about me, I hope, but I know that I'm guilty of this at times as well) that "computer people" have no end of cases where they think their preexisting knowledge is enough to solve a problem when it has little or no bearing on the topic at hand (politics, biology, whatever). I see no reason that can't also be true within the computer field as well. Because a pretty cursory Google would have explained all the things people elsewhere in this thread have explained about how to actually do this--but he didn't do it, relied on his own previous knowledge, and it didn't really apply.