Quoting "Steve Roylance" <roylance@corplink.com.au>

when the Space Shuttle blew up 60km above Texas, over 98% of the data was recovered from the disks found in the debris.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9083718/Shuttle_i_Columbia_s_i_hard_d... "Everything but the drive's platters were virtually unusable" so the important parts storing the data was still there:-) But only one of three disks "survived": "Two other hard drives aboard the Columbia were so severely damaged that it was impossible to extract any usable data" I also found interesting: "Edwards said the Seagate hard drive -- which was about eight years old in 2003 -- featured much greater fault tolerance and durability than current hard drives of similar capacity." Anyway, amusing story:-) Regards Peter