3. There are special hard drive diagnostics and repair facilities where data can be recovered directly from damaged drive’s magnetic platters. Yes, such facilities do exist, although…mostly in the West and the cost of such recovery varies from a thousand to ten thousand dollars. And it is applicable only for some models of HDD and the recovery would only be partial. That is why it would be more appropriate to believe that there is no universal and all-embracing notion of such facility due to several issues. Firstly, all modern storage devices have different command systems and there is also such thing as translator. So, even if you read all disk sectors sequentially, you will still need to somehow salvage a logical structure of data from physical sectors. Secondly, the density of data storage on modern HDDs is such that reading information from HDD’s surface is possible only with its own heads and it is of no use if a platter is scratched because heads would crash immediately.

4. Overwritten data can be recovered using the disk’s residual magnetism. The way data is written on modern HDDs involves a complete magnetization of the surface area during data recording. That is why there is simply no residual magnetism.

5. State security agencies possess super equipment which is not available commercially. In reality, there are no wizards working for such authorities and they do not have a magic data recovery machine anyway. Moreover, the authorities quite often resort to commercial companies for data recovery.