They rip you off for tasks that you can easily do at home. They misinform and exaggerate your problem. In my case, this led me to take a wrong step with my hard drive.
Here's my story.
My external hard drive loaded with important files wouldn't mount after have been plugged to an android TV box.
Mac Disk Utility couldn't repair it so I brought it to this store down the street, thinking they might have more professional software to repair the partition table or recovery files. They charge $25 dollars for diagnostics. Fine with me. After several days, I was told that the hard drive was irrepairable on the phone. "The drive won't mount," said the guy. After the call I was like, of course it won't, that's why I brought it in for you guys to repair. Anyway I dropped by to retrieve my drive. In the store I was given more explanation. The guy said that he tried to repair the disk but failed. At this point I knew that data recovery had to be performed to get any data back. But then he said that this was a HARDWARE PROBLEM and the drive is NOT USABLE ANYMORE. He explained to me that 'there is a main board that control the hard drive and it's defect.' To recover the data, he suggest me send the drive to the guys at drivesaversdatarecovery.com. If you go to that site you see people in dust free rooms working on hard drive internal parts. It cost $500+ to do the recovery. You'd believe that your drive is really broken beyond repair
I believed him and was about to throw the drive out, as the data on that drive isn't worth $500. Then one day I thought I'd just try reformatting it and see if it works. To my surprise, the drive spins up fine and totally works. I suddenly realize that I made a mistake. After reformatting, retrieving data gets harder.
Angry, I felt I was misled by Gadgetworks. So I went back to argue. They refund my money which is not the point I was trying to make. Meanwhile they insisted they were right. And get this. The guy showed me the 'diagnostics' he performed. He just ran REPAIR DISK AND REPAIR DISK PERMISSIONS with disk utility on a mac. When that failed, that's when they had told me that the drive had a HARDWARE problem. And that's all they did to charge $25.
Now, in case you didn't know, with any free data recovery software from online you can run a hard drive recovery at home with your laptop and get some of your permanently deleted files back. I did that with my other hard drive and found many movies back. When you delete a file, you only the location information of the data, the data itself is still scattered intact on the drive somewhere. Data recovery programs scan the whole drive and try put some of the pieces together. You won't get the original hierarchy of files but you can still recovery many important files like pictures and documents. And this guy told me all my data is gone and want me to spend $700. Sorry but I'm not stupid. read more