[dalke]

Thanks. Yes, I should have included the "that had been written before" in my quote.

I didn't look too into the question of how to recover the contents of a hard disk with microscopy because I figured it would be possible, but expensive. Looking now, I quickly found a MS thesis at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/26g4p84b which recovered data from a disk using MFM. While the performance was poor, the author attributes that to the experimental setup.

Ahh, and http://www.dataclinic.it/magnetic-force-microscopy.htm appears to provide a commercial service to extra data from a hard disk using magnetic force microscopy.