>> investigators were desperate to repair not only the disks, but in the damage to their reputations as well. so they collected the pieces and sent them to the u.s. military's brand new commuter forensics laboratory. >> they said you're not going to believe what happened. we were interviewing this guy and he reaches into a box and pulls out a diskette with a pair of pinking shears and starts cutting them up. they're in the mail to you. okay, i'm not a magician, i'm a computer crime investigator. 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. all our contacts in the federal law enforcement. we went to the private sector, you know, because maybe they had tools. 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. it would cost close to $1 million and there were no