Bingowings said:

I believe it was first pioneered by Bell End Labs.

Produced by Cock Sure Industries?

On topic: still not sure if it's a prank or not, if it's good that he's managed to pretty much get everything back. The file undelete's may well manage to retrieve things to. If you have lots of time on your hands you can just have them keep trying to read until they manage to. When I was cloning my failed hard-drive it would just keep trying to read until it did succesfully; could take 2-3 days, but would eventually do it. (The whole clone took that long, not an individual file retrieval).