@ursula: I normally don't advise anyone by PM, and I didn't do it here. If I write something I want it to stick, so I won't have to write it again
I wanted to retrieve data from an old disk once and sent it to a company. They took it, checked it, then sent it back after I told them that the data isn't worth >400€ - that would have been the price for clean-room data retrieval.
Besides: Do you know the name of the german company who does the really heavy work? Would be interesting to read up a bit about them.