Yeah, I have done a lot of various data recovery with a few hundred drives over the years and I didn't do it with a "clean room". Not on the level of what he does but it worked out in the end. I always told people if they really needed their data back they need to go to a company like Rossmann's. If they just kind of hoped they could get it back and wanted it cheap I would try. You know, freezing a drive can work in some cases. I have even ran a drive while its in a freezer with a very long IDE (and SATA) cable for a few hours and it worked enough to recover the things people wanted. It tends to only work once though in my experience. Once it's in the freezer it stays there until all of the data you want is off of it.