It was around Christmas, and a lot of people seemed to be out of the office for vacation. My sales rep was not technical and didn't understand what I meant when I asked for the "bitstream image" or "raw image" of the drive. I kept pressing, leaving voicemails in which I said stuff like "Look-- you don't know what I'm asking for. Send this to somebody in your engineering department and they'll know what I mean. I want to give you more money than you're asking for to get this."

Eventually I got a call back from somebody saying that they understood what I was asking for but couldn't send it to me. At that point I got fed-up and paid the minimum bench fee and asked for my disk back. I probably should have pushed the issue further, but my need was timely and I'd already started reconstructing the data from other sources.