>> 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 the box and pulls out a diskette with a pair of pinking shears and starts cutting up this diskette, and they're in the mail to you. i'm like, 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. and all our contacts, federal law enforcement, we went to the private sector, you know, because maybe they had tools and techniques. so, we pulled out all the stops. >> one federal agency offered to try, but said it would take