Unless they can determine the history of the polarisation of each tiny portion of the hard disk, and be sure that the history is chronologicaly identical for all the above. The no a good LL format will render all info destroyed.
And if you consider trying to do the above, then say on an 80GB hard drive, you have nealy 700,000 Million! of them little bits to test.
On a standard quick/High level format then the indexing on the disk is simply removed. Software can hunt this disks and pice back together teh file structure (not always very successfully)
In this case, it may just be that the mast Boot Record that tells the computer how to start the operating system has been wiped, a simple fix and files should still be intact and could be inspected on another booted operating system.
One thing you need to be sure of is that any recoverd files are not infected.
Viruses/maleware/spyware are one of the big reasons I like Linux.
TT
P.S.. Hopefuly the chassis is comming on nicely
