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The terms are utter bullshit. You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble it . . . . The Gutmann paper referenced elsewhere in the thread concludes

by pius 19y ago

The terms are utter bullshit. You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble it . . . . The Gutmann paper referenced elsewhere in the thread concludes that overwriting the drive (something like 34 times IIRC) with zeroes is important because a dedicated analyst can measure the residual magnetism of each sector of the drive to infer the most recent "long term" binary values. Not allowing the drive to be opened makes this type of analysis kind of difficult.

xirium 19y ago
It may be possible to retreive the data without openning a drive. I can think of two methods for achieving this objective. Firstly, I've seen reference to SCSI commands to retrieve "unbaked" sectors from CDROMs. Support for this functionality varies but it may be possible that some harddisks have undocumented functionality. You may wish to check the widespread implementation of DRM in harddisks for circumstantial evidence of such functionality. Alternatively, it may be possible to replace harddisk firmware which allows retrieval of magnetic traces. Again, I've seen reference to "low-level formatting" which wipes harddisk firmware. If the firmware is accessible in this manner then retreival is possible for almost all harddisks without openning them. It would also demonstrate that data recovery services are doing a shoddy job of imaging disks, running some standard recovery tools, and maybe performing some sector edits. This test raises the bar because you have three days and writing to the disk is not allowed. That would leave you with three days to reverse engineer the existing firmware.