Originally posted here by fraggin
While I have noticed some very good replys. Lost of people mention zero'ing out the drive is sufficient. I know somone that claims to have an app that will restore a drive zero'ed out up to 8 times over. I have never seen this in operation, but he claims to have restored crashed drives with the application to get them up long enought xfer data. *Shrugs* could be a lie, who knows.....


There is no application which can read data that the hard drive can no longer sense--this is an impossibility. You have to physically remove the drive platters and subject them to magnetic force microscopy or somesuch procedure. Which, by the way, is not an easy, cheap or quick thing to do.

Also,
I had to take a client's think-pad HD to data recovery specialest to recover some time sensitive unique data. The place that I took it to prided theirselves on their recovery succcess rate and had some pictures of various drives where data had been recovered. Among these included Hard Drives damaged in Fires and Floods. They were good. They recovered everything from a Laptop drive for me that was no longer recognized by the computer. Yes, they were expensive. But just know that some people are willing to pay the price. When you add curiosity to the factor, you have to ask yourself how much one would pay for a key to open a chest of unknown contents.
This sounds like they had to re-mount the drive platters with a new read-write head mechanism. However, this is a far cry from data recovery when the surface itself has been wiped.