Heh. I just had to deal with the same thing for a client of mine. This is the first time I have had to send a hard drive in to a big data recovery company (I used Kroll because they were local. for the free diagnostic sounds like maybe you used Drive Savers? lol) and well this client had a car hit a tele pole, kill power for the hole day, next day PC didn't see a hard drive yet the other 50 PC plus 2 servers (but those are on battery backup so they shut down properly) were fine. the drive would power, on you would hear 4 clicks and then that is it.
Here is the thing. Head Crashes, if that really is the reason, can def cause physical damage to the platters. The thing is it fully unrecoverable, probably not. If it had some top secret shit the goverment would get it off.
They were only able to get 13% of my clients drive image with not a lot of valuable data recovered. I don't know how bad the heads were crashing but if those clicks i heard was the drive trying to spin up, and those heads move across those platters, it will make it very difficult to get anything off.
if the platters are fine there are ways to trasnplant them in a donor and get it off which is what i though they would do and i was so confident in them getting the data but the platters were scratched by the heads trying to access the disk.
You think they would make these drives with a sensor that if the platters are turning THE HEADS WOULDN"T FREAKEN MOVE RIGHT?
And honestly even though THF has a strict no piracy policy, i really doubt every person who was all "We don't help your kind, if you want it buy it" has actaully bought every piece of software they own. In this day and age i'm sure everyone had downloaded something from a program, to music, to movies in their life time. It's just today it is easier to get caught unless you have a VPN service that doesn't keep logs, but i don't see that as a reason of why they would turn you down. I mean movies? unless they are all labled like
Batman.VS.Superman.1080p.bluray.rip.x264.yify.mp4
and it was just Batman VS Superman.mp4 they would have no idea if you ripped your own movie or downloaded it.
A lot of stuff you download are ISO's and have the crack in the the ISO. They can't see that unless they actually open that ISO. Until then it is just 1's and 0's they see, so i doubt that was an issue. It could have just been that bad that recovery would have been too much for them to deal with that it would cost you $$$$$
SOOOOOOOOO
Moral of the story...
HAVE A BACKUP! XD