How to establish a data recovery workshop?

Clarifications

.

It is implied that it is physically possible to retrieve data from crushed hard drives.

In most cases, this is just not possible.

Disk platters that are made of glass will shatter when crushed, and the subsequent chance of recovering any usable data is very very very small.

Disks with Aluminum-alloy platters that have been crushed will also be very unlikely to yield any data whatsoever, since the magenetic coating is most likely cracked and scratched off when the drive is crushed.

Most commercial hard-disk crushing machines drill through the platters and create ripples in the platters which reduce the recoverable surface area even further.

With a team of technicians and a magnetic force microscope (mfm), you may be able to recover small portions of the disk on a bit-by-bit basis, a process that would take many, many months.

A lab using MFM methods can take months to recover even a small drive, and would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Commercial MFM drive recovery methods are geared towards disk platters that are intact, and MFM recovery methods for non-intact platters would have to be done by hand, which falls into the 'team of scientists working for a year' category.

Since you are measuring individual bits, you have to deal with a density approaching 2000 bits per square inch. Plus you have to reverse-engineer how the disk drive and disk controller electronics have encoded the data, and how the OS has formatted the file. And don't forget that most computers do not store data contiguously on the media, so without a valid file allocation table, at least 50%-80% of what you recover will be meaningless because it is impossible to determine what files each bit belongs to.

A facility which contains some of the requisite equipment and skill exists at the University of Maryland, which most likely cost hundreds of millions to build, staff, and equip.

So the short answer is, with a team of 25 highly skilled specialists, an investment of $200M+ USD, and about a year, you could recover maybe 1% of a crushed drive's content, if it was an aluminum platter, and less than 0.1% if it had a glass platter. Or, most likely you would recover nothing.