A customer brought in a hard drive hoping to recover the data. The data wasn’t worth paying a laboratory so she brought it to me for an attempt.

I was not able to recover the data, but I was able to diagnose the problem so for no charge she got the peace of mind of knowing the data was gone forever. The platter was badly scratched. I called the lab and they told me they couldn’t recover the data even for $100,000! Impossible?