I see, so basically you use your "best judgment" when you say that you cleaned the platter or actually would be able to clean it, since the burnishing head you use is not what manufacturers use. Per my understanding the safety of this process is also not backed by manufacturer standards or procedures.

AFAIK manufacturers use special solvents in a cleaning process to:
1. Remove lubricant layer that is viscous and may hold some debris
2. Remove physical debris from platters by utilizing ionic removal feature of the solvent
After that the platters should be re-lubricated and polished to make sure that the lubricant layer does not have any bumps.

I'm still skeptical on the process shown on the video but it is a possibility that it works for you.

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SAN, NAS, RAID, Server, and HDD Data Recovery.

Well, that would be consistent with the 100MHz write frequency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_and_DVD_writing_speed

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

I am pretty sure that manufacturers do not get out 1200grit sandpaper to removed coating of monolith chips, or use many of practices that Scott Moulton has shown, or many many other techniques different DR firms have come up with.

High pressure gas - many moons ago I worked at a sandblasting outfit. there is only 2 parts, High pressure air and garnet. If you replace the garnet with particles inside a Hard Disk, well in laymans terms you are also sandblasting the drive, those particles that were on the platter are now being pushed around at high speed.

Anything you do inside of a drive is probably not 100% ideal. If the particles are now sanded smooth, sheared off, ground off.. whatever.. then they are not going to be impacting the head, or at least the head has less chance of getting smashed off after 1%.

as someone that never works inside HDDs, this seems to make sense. Seems the argument is not if it really works sometimes, but if the process is the very best one to use.

it is good to see these discussions happening now anyway