Sadly, it was no no avail

It transpires that the original fault was that the client had run the system restore and lost his data. Easy enough, right?
Poor client took the drive into a PC shop who proceeded to run recovery software on it and recover the data, sadly back to the same drive. Obviously this didn't work so they did the same again a further 3 times, just to make sure the data was well and truly overwritten and scrambled.
Whether or not they purposely killed the PCB to hide the evidence is not known.