How do I access a hard drive from a computer where windows is deleted?

Here is the current situation:

My cousin deleted Windows from his hard drive (yeah, don't ask...). His hard drive still has about 200 GB of files on it that he may want to recover before we format the hard drive and reinstall Windows 7 to it. Is there a way I can create a bootable CD from some utility that will allow me to access the files on the hard drive, and copy it to a flash drive? What's the best utility for that?

UPDATE:

In my case, all I had to do was reinstall Windows from the installation CD, and it actually moved all the old files to a directory called Windows.old. In other words, formatting the hard drive wasn't necessary to reinstall Windows 7. I realized this only after creating a Linux Live USB (I decided to go with Peppermint) and copying the files to an external hard drive (a process which was overly complicated and involved a painful process of trying to get all the drives to mount properly).

Answer

Download UNetbootin, use it to download the latest version of Ubuntu and create a LiveUSB from it. Boot using that and copy the files to a USB drive.

Note: If you want to go with a smaller distro, get Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux instead.