Not all of them may be on the server. She apparently used her private laptop for a lot of these things, which I assume means that she took it home with her, etc. All of this carrying around of official business is highly illegal, of course, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.
It’s not clear to me what computer they are looking at. But even leaving aside all other considerations, how in the world do you “scratch” a hard drive?
If it’s a laptop hard drive, very simple, if you want to got the sinister rout.
Take out the screws that mount the HD to the case. Remove the HD. Then take a hammer or any blunt force object to it, gently. Perhaps even shake it hard.
The innocuous way : the “scratch” was likely the needle that reads the data scratching against the surface of the drive. It can happen from use over time, a power disruption while writing to the drive, etc.
It means the platter is scratched. If the head malfunctioned or the system was dropped while the drive was not parked, done...
Recovery from a scratched platter is hit or miss. Archived pst files may be intact but not if they are large which I can almost guarantee they are. There has to be a paper trail somewhere of who they sent the drive to or even if they did. If someone is saying the platter is scratched, the only way to know that is if someone opened the dive up and that was hopefully done by a recovery company.
It's possible. The thing that scratches the platter would be the read/write head itself which travels on a swinging arm, just barely above the surface of the platter. A sharp shock (like dropping the machine) while the platters are spinning could do it. It's also called a "head crash". Recovery of data from the drive at that point would likely require the assistance of firms that have specialized equipment for remounting and reading platters slowly, sector by sector.
Partly disassemble drive, scratch disk, reassemble. Simple really.