>> investigators were desperate to repair not only the disks but the damage to their reputations as well. so they collected the pieces and sent them to the u.s. military's brand-new computer forensics laboratory. >> they said you're not going to believe what happened. we were interviewing this guy. he reaches into a box with a pair of pinking shears and he starts cutting up this diskette. they're in the mail to you. i'm like, okay. wow. i'm not a magician. what are we going to do? >> to their dismay, they couldn't find a single instance of someone successfully reassembling a damaged floppy disk. >> we were calling everybody we could think of in all our contacts. we went to the private sector. so we pulled out all the stops. >> one federal agency offered to try but said it would take months, possibly a year, to figure out how to do it.