Hard Drive Crash and Desperate for Recovery Help

Question

Problem:  I have black and white JPEGS that need to be put back into color.
We had a motor seize on a back up hard drive before getting the data backed up a second time.  I'm curious if there are any "backdoor" options for recovery.  Here is the scenario:
3 months ago we finished editing a wedding and exported color and black & white photos for the client.  We moved the original RAW files off the laptop onto a back up external hard drive.   A few weeks later, that external hard drive, with ALL the original RAW images on it, crashed after our cat knocked it off our desk while the HD was running.  However, we have the final JPEGS saved on DVDs.  As fate would have it, the client came back later requesting several black and white photos to be given to them in color instead.
After a thorough look from a computer expert it was concluded that the recovery would have to be done in a lab at a cost of $1800.  I gave a local shop our laptop to see if they could recover any "deleted" files and recapture the original RAW images.  Still looking through those but out of the RAW files that are there, most are unreadable or contain only part of the photos.  (Still haven't seen any of the clients photos we need anyway)
Is there a way to get the eported black & white JPEGS back into color? 
Maybe a backup file or saved catalogue combined with the JPEGS?
Bottom line:  Is there a way to get around this problem at all without the original RAW images?

Answer 1

3 months ago we finished editing a wedding and exported color and black & white photos for the client.  We moved the original RAW files off the laptop onto a back up external hard drive.
Perhaps you are using the word backup to mean something different that I mean. To me, a backup means you have an original one on disk, and another copy on a different physical disk. It sounds as if you do not have this second copy. If you do, and I misunderstood, then please let me know.
Is there a way to get the eported black & white JPEGS back into color?
This is probably not possible. You could, if you were very good with photoshop, "colorize" thie images with a lot of effort, but there would be no way to guarantee that the colorized images are in any way close to the original color images, other than through tedious manual effort.
Maybe a backup file or saved catalogue combined with the JPEGS?
Saved catalogs do not contain the information about what was contained in the original RAW. If you have the Lightroom previews available as well, and these contain the color previews, there is a way to extract the previews, but depending on how you set your preferences, these may not be high-res previews.
Is there a way to get around this problem at all without the original RAW images?
I don't think there is an easy way to do it. Manual tedious colorizing of the photos, extracting previews, or paying $1800. I hope this prompts you to adopt a strategy of regularly backing up your photos and catalog file.