Drive recovery

In mid-March on this thread, I described an old IBM Deskstar 20 gig from a Mac G3 that died. I sent the drive to Gillware.com for recovery. My experience? In general, I'm happy that the data was recovered. I'm unhappy in the sense that I'm out $800 without any explanation, or new professional connection to a service I might need to use in the future, and for the yucky feeling of dealing with clueless and misleading customer service people. I get this feeling that it's my expectations that may not be reasonable, and that I was dealing with an industry that's known for bait-and-switch and rough treatment. My initial diagnosis was correct, apparently. This looked like and sounded like an NVRAM failure (as described in my initial post about this.) I told them this in my service request on their web site. However, the customer service person at intake did not follow through on my requests to see if I'd receive a discount as an affiliate (I'd signed up a year before, they give a finder's fee of 15% or so), if the charge would be different if it was just an NVRAM problem, or if I could pay less to get a pure block recovery and not a file-level recovery. I had to send them a new drive to hold the recovered data along with the old drive. Apparently asking for a block-copy isn't their practice, as it can lead to situations where the customer is given a bunch of data that doesn't contain what they wanted and doesn't want to pay for it post-facto. First they told me in an email and a phone call that I would be subject to up to $300 in addtiional clean room fees, which I had to approve before they'd proceed, which I did. Later I was told the recovery would cost $800, which is more than the $700 minimum for Mac data. (And twice the price than if the drive was PC.) When they've recovered your files, they send you a viewer that shows you the names of the files they've recovered. When they called to say it was ready, I asked to speak to a technician before they charged my card. My request was ignored. I received my new drive with no explanation. I had to make a specific request to have my old drive returned. Indeed, the NVRAM was resoldered. Apparently asking for an explanation of what was wrong with your drive is not within their practice, either, nor are they willing to tell what they did to fix it even in vague terms. After emailing some complaints, I received a voice mail message engineer who actually worked on my drive. Apparently a great number of their customers are (as they put it) "amateur data recovery personnel that would love to know how we recover data" and "if we inform people what we do and how we do it we would not get any future cases." The engineer said the case record had no details about what was actually wrong with my drive or how they repaired it. They can't explain what they did for $700, nor for the $100 that brought it to $800. I'm baffled by this. The founder's voice mail said I wasn't charged clean room fees. The engineer said if their sticker was on the drive then they had to open it. He also suggested that they'd waived the clean room fees because I was paying Mac prices, or that the parts it needed were so cheap that they didn't want to charge me. The drive seals are as dusty as they were when I sent them the drive. Don't you clean a drive before you put it in the clean room? I wanted to find a data recovery service that could give me good service and a professional level of interaction when it came to explaining what happened to the drive and presumably about the chances for recovery. I didn't get that. I like paying for the services I get. I don't like the feeling that I'm paying bend-over prices and that I should thank them for telling me nothing. - John