Disk recovery racket, continued

The owner of the A1 Best Computer store on Lake City responded to the complaint I lodged at the Better Business Bureau (great resource, BBB!).

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When Mr. Bartosz brought his hard drive for diagnostic, he knew that the hard drive can not be accessed. When I called Mr. Bartosz for status, I explained to him the problem with the hard drive and I informed him that we use different data recovery programs in order to determine the hard drive failure cause. when running a data recovery program it will sometimes take days for the program to run through the entire hard drive especially if there is bad sector in the drive , the program will get stuck for awhile until it passes the bad sectors, I also informed Mr. Bartosz that it may also be that the controller board is not responding, therefore before we putt more time than we already did, we need to make sure that the customer is willing to spend more money on the hard drive if the recovery is successful quoted him $350.00 which is a fraction of the cost data recovery companies charge.

Me bartosz recommended that I purchase the controller board and try it, I told him that he need to either purchase it him self otherwise if he wants us to locate it will be costly since it has to be the same identical one I also informed him that he will need to pay for it upfront whether or not it will work since it's a procedure that is performed per his request.
Mr. Batosz got upset since I couldn't assure him of the drive recovery if the controller board was replaced. that's when Mr. Bartosz started telling me that he is a computer tech and that he knows about computer more than we do, so I asked him to come and pick it up and try the controller board replacement him self if he feels confident that it will fix the problem.

This is the reason why I asked him for a flat fee originally knowing that the problem may not be solved by replacing the controller board and that the flat fee will only be paid if the recovery is successful.

Mr. Barosz then asked for his original $70.00 dollar that he prepaid for the first hour labor and the diagnostic, which is not refundable as it stats in his receipt # 8112 " all sales are final"
Additionally the time we spent on the drive to diagnose it and to see if the data is recoverable is much more than on hour labor he paid therefore no refund will be issued at this time but as a good faith from our company we will offer an in store credit for $70.00 that can be used toward labor and not part purchase at A-1 Best Computer.

Thank you

Sincerely,
Mohamed Lahlou
C.E.O A-1 Best Computer, Inc
206-523-6627

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To which I said:
It is a matter of trust between the customer and the service provider. I normally assume that the provider will be honest with me, answer my questions, and charge me only for the necessary work that's actually been done.

My conversation with Mr Lahlou convinced me that my trust was misplaced. To begin with, he told me that he has already spent three days working on my disk. The $70 I paid up front covered only one hour, so the implication was that I was somehow indebted to Mr Lahlou. I was curious if it was normal for Mr Lahlou spends three days on every disk (how can he afford this?), or if my disk was an especially difficult puzzle to solve.

I asked him for more information, and became even more suspicious when he started tellig me contradicting things. I am not a computer technician, but I do understand the jargon.

- If the controller on the disk doesn't respond, there is no sense in running diagnostic programs. The only option then is to replace the controller.

- If the controller is okay, then the dignostic programs would show how much damage was done to disk sectors.

I couldn't get the information from Mr Lahlou one way or another, and even in his rebuttal he cannot get his story straight. The only sensible assumption is that he really didn't know.

In fact, I know now that the controller was fine, because I ordered an identical disk from the manufacturer (contrary to what Mr Lahlou says, it was very easy and it cost only $95) and I swapped the controllers. The old controller worked fine with the new disk, while the new controller didn't help with the old disk.

Since my trust in Mr Lahlou was already strained, I didn't like his next offer, which essentially was a gamble in which I could only lose. If he fixed the disk, I'd pay him $350, no matter how easy it was. If he couldn't (or wouldn't) fix it, I'd be left with a broken disk. I don't like gambling. I just wanted to know what his plan was, and pay for the actual work and parts, no matter what the result.

I cannot accept Mr Lahlou's offer of in-store credit because after such a bad experience I am never going to visit his store again.