Feature from PC Magazine: Hard Drive Healers

“When […] Ontrack engineers carried the [hard disk]drive into their clean room and opened it up, the head was damaged, and the platters were caked with dust and smoke residue. But a week later, the company sent us an e-mail. Its engineers had recovered 100 percent of the data.

For Ontrack, it was just another week at the office. Apparently the company recovers data from fire-damaged drives all the time. And that’s one of the easier tasks. In 2003, Ontrack engineers successfully recovered files from a drive that arrived in Minnesota with a bullet hole in it. A few weeks later, they salvaged a disk that had spent three months at the bottom of a lake.”

PC Magazine via Juha
some links added