Andrew - we already ran recovery tools within the OS. We're trying to extract data from the vmdk layer directly which I thought would be below the OS layer and not susceptible to the same damage from deduplication.
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
The VMDK is just a file container for the OS volume.
If the Recovery Shop is a specialist in Forensics, otherwise send it to Kroll Ontrack Data Recovery, but as it's a VMDK you could send to lots of vendors, but again if the OS was left to run, the erased data may have been over written, by OS read and writes to the NTFS volume.