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I used to teach a Unix/Linux sysadmin course, and one of my guest lecturers was a guy from IBAS. He made it quite clear that even those guys, who make a living recovering data from hard drives in all kinds of sorry states, couldn't recover the data if it was overwritten. The amount of times it was overwritten didn't matter in the slightest, once was enough.

If I remember correctly he said that the only thing that overwriting data multiple times does is make you feel more secure. The data is gone after the first overwrite, after that it's all about covering your ass and feeling good.

My first call would been to http://www.ibas.com/

Indeed, very odd. During a visit (with my class) at Ibas, they said they would have little to no problem recovering almost all of the data even after several reformat/rewrite cycles. And while Ibas ain't cheap, I'm pretty sure Ibas would be an order of magnitude or two cheaper than rescanning all the documents, not to mention faster.

Wtf?!? They call to ms and dell, but not to people who actually recover data? My first call would been to http://www.ibas.com/

ps. I don't work at ibas

http://www.ibas.com/

I want my cookie now, please.

There's also some advantage in separating the storage medium from the read/write heads. If either part in a hard drive fails, you're literally fscked (except for some really expensive recovery solutions by Ibas or the like). On the other hand, you can always put an optical disc in a brand new drive. And if a disc is scratched beyond readability in your current drive, chances are you can read it with another drive in the future.

These guys will have a solution for you. They know how to recover the data. They know how to erase it past any hope of recovery.

Disclaimer: Affiliations from past work experience.

One could always use this

zap!

Chapter 1. PC Magazine

Chapter 2. The Register

Chapter 3. Security Focus

Chapter 4. Webopedia

Chapter 5. ibas

First of all, since _two_ disks got screwed at the same time, you've lost the "normal" chance of getting the data back. RAID-5 ensures that if ONE disk fails, you can get the data back due to the parity-stuff - but not if two disks fail. You probably know this.

So, what needs to be done, is to get one of the disks back online again. That *should* be possible, and if nothing really really bad happened, should, i think, in theory, be as easy as getting a lab to pull the disk-platters out and put a new motor / new electronics on them. I'm not sure about this though ;)

Preferrably it could be done by the disk-manufacturer.

You could also check out an excellent company in Norway called IBAS. Check out http://www.ibas.com/america/index.html for their american office. They are really excellent at data reconstruction.

IBAS is another company that offers data recovery.

http://www.ibas.com

These guys have some severely cool toys!