"Data from Columbia disk drives survived the shuttle accident"

""When we got it, it was two hunks of metal stuck together. We couldn't even tell it was a hard drive. It was burned and the edges were melted," said Edwards, an engineer at Kroll Ontrack Inc., outside Minneapolis."

"After cleaning the platters with a chemical solution, Edwards used them in a newly built drive. The process — two days from start to finish — captured 99 percent of the drive's information."

"And to drive home just what a long shot his recovery had been, he later had no success with two other drives found in Columbia's wreckage. Blasted by the unfathomable furnace of entry into the atmosphere, their metals had lost the ability to hold a magnetic charge."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080510/ap_on_sc/shuttle_recovered_data