Another run in with the Geek Squad.

[Digital Micro]

Had a customer call in a panic needing data recovery services. The client is a freelance graphic design artist with no backup system in place. So I go on-site to the clients office to pickup his hard drive. Before the customer would sign my work order I get this little golden nugget. He has a friend from church who works at Geek Squad. This "agent" wants me to call him and describe how I am going to perform the recovery so he can tell the client I know what I am doing.

I know a lot of people would be upset and give the drive back. I took the drive back to my office and actually called this Geek Squad professional. I told him if he would like to know my data recovery process he is more than welcome to come watch. I then informed him I would be giving him an invoice for training. He actually hung up on me.

 

[Krilus]

Ha,

As I was reading you described exactly what I was thinking how I would handle it.

 

[katz]

That's great, I'll have to remember that when/if that situation occurs for me.

 

[OaksLabs]

I like to shame GS by performing repairs that they said couldn't be done for my customers. Two weeks ago an old XP laptop came in that needed a data backup, and GS said the HDD was blank. Ubuntu saw the partitions just fine, I copied the data off, and after a TestDisk (partition rebuild) and a CHKDSK the laptop booted again too.

 

[NYJimbo]

You gotta wonder how many millions of computers are sitting at county landfills and dumps around the country because Geek Squad told a customer a machine could not be repaired or priced it so high the customer decided to junk it. It's sad how often people will go to a small shop only as a last resort to find that their machine can be repaired and often for a fraction of what Geek Squad quoted.

 

[Markverhyden]

I like to shame GS by performing repairs that they said couldn't be done for my customers. Two weeks ago an old XP laptop came in that needed a data backup, and GS said the HDD was blank. Ubuntu saw the partitions just fine, I copied the data off, and after a TestDisk (partition rebuild) and a CHKDSK the laptop booted again too.

And it's not just the Sheep Squad. Years ago, at CompUSA, a customer came in. She had paid some local shop $600 to recover the data for her drive which was not booting. They said the same thing, data is toast. In that case I scanned it with R-Tools, picked the first partition it found and got all of the files. Wrote up a detailed report and suggested she do a charge back. Don't think she pursued that.

 

[FremontPC]

And nevertheless, they offer their own system sucking preload of GS bloat on new computers... at a premium, of course. Now we've got Staples and Office MaxPo with their offerings. Just bring it on in and we'll remedy the problem we caused in the first place or we guarantee that we'll point you to a new Win10 PC that will maintain our income stream .

 

[Altster]

C'mon folks. You know that all of these big-box retail outlets only do one thing - sell new equipment. The GS is a pitiful repair shop and we all know it. But it is their first mission to try to sell the client / customer a newer system or do some sort of high-dollar estimate to try to force a sale! That's why we see so many of those little purple stickers on many of our repairs / scrapped units - for this very reason.

I once had a conversation with a young man from many years back who told me that GS had a training facility that actually taught their associates all about how to go about making a sale rather than doing repairs.

I think the original idea of the "in-house service offerings at the big-box retail locations" were primarily put in place to aid with immediate hardware upgrades (install memory, etc..)

 

[DebugDave]

I have to agree. From my experience, GS has given extremely high estimates, frequently 50% to 100% over what I would have charged for a repair. My conclusion was they were trying to steer the customer into a new computer purchase rather than repair an ancient 3-4 year old computer.

 

[cypress]

Had a customer call in a panic needing data recovery services. The client is a freelance graphic design artist with no backup system in place. So I go on-site to the clients office to pickup his hard drive. Before the customer would sign my work order I get this little golden nugget. He has a friend from church who works at Geek Squad. This "agent" wants me to call him and describe how I am going to perform the recovery so he can tell the client I know what I am doing.

I know a lot of people would be upset and give the drive back. I took the drive back to my office and actually called this Geek Squad professional. I told him if he would like to know my data recovery process he is more than welcome to come watch. I then informed him I would be giving him an invoice for training. He actually hung up on me.

Am I the only one wanting to know if the conversation got heated and escalated before that hang up?

I'm kidding lol

 

[trevm999]

Anyone who actually knows anything and works for Geek Squad usually goes to online support so they can work from home. The downside of their online support is that there is no way to be thorough when you are working on 10 computers at a time and try to spend only 15 minutes on each computer. Also, depending on how one purchased their support package, it may take 15 minutes or longer before actually receiving support.

 

[NaglTech]

I always cringe when my elderly clients on a budget tell me what they paid for service at GS. I teach computer literacy classes to seniors and we always have to spend time discussing what to look for when getting help. GS doesn't tell them that reinstalling the OS means they lose all their personal files.

 

[MDD1963]

My mother told me back in 1996-1997 she had her Win95/Packard Bell/ Pentium 100 repaired at Geeksquad; when I inquired how much they charged her, she said $250; I asked what parts were replaced, her reply was 'none', but said that Geeksquad had said reinstalling Win95 was very difficult.

Indeed.

 

[Davena]

My mother told me back in 1996-1997 she had her Win95/Packard Bell/ Pentium 100 repaired at Geeksquad; when I inquired how much they charged her, she said $250; I asked what parts were replaced, her reply was 'none', but said that Geeksquad had said reinstalling Win95 was very difficult.

Indeed.

Hey..there were like - 200 floppies. ROFL

 

[lcoughey]

I've certainly seen my share of box store mess ups, but I've seen just as many, if not more screwed up drives come in from technicians who just just assumed that their client's photos were not worth our data recovery rates.

 

[callthatgirl]

I had a client last week that took their computer to GS and they couldn't find the data, sent them to Kroll. (I cant' believe the hd was that corrupted, but possibly)

Kroll gave them back their hd, client took to GS to put on new Windows 10 computer and they took the data off the Kroll drive and put on the empty GS data transferred folder. WTH!

Kroll charged client $1100 for the data.

Client had Mozy backing up the computer, I found out later.

Don't even ask me how this got this far...huge miscommunication. Client was like "the data was backed up???"

Total mess!

 

[FancifullFish]

I had a client last week that took their computer to GS and they couldn't find the data, sent them to Kroll. (I cant' believe the hd was that corrupted, but possibly)

Kroll gave them back their hd, client took to GS to put on new Windows 10 computer and they took the data off the Kroll drive and put on the empty GS data transferred folder. WTH!

Kroll charged client $1100 for the data.

Client had Mozy backing up the computer, I found out later.

Don't even ask me how this got this far...huge miscommunication. Client was like "the data was backed up???"

Total mess!

I had one instance where it was a simple HDD replacement for a Mac. The computer had been witting at Best Buy for 2 weeks and my client never received an update from GS so he decided to call them. Their response was, "Well sir we're going to have to send it off as I don't have the proper equipment to change out the HDD, and it will take about 2 weeks to get the computer back."
Well, my client wasn't too happy that they never even called to give him an update so he brought me his computer, had it done in 48 hours and installed an aviation program he had. All I can say is that GS makes me look REALLY good, and I laugh occasional at GS's mess-ups.

 

[TechLady]

Geek Squad et al are so terrible I wish there was some way to tell everybody what they're really up to without looking bad yourself. They're just horrible. Would almost like to march in front of the store with a sandwich board..."DON'T DO IT!"

 

[lcoughey]

I just received a drive yesterday that was in a laptop that had liquid damage. GS looked at it and said that they couldn't do anything, so the end user took it to a local computer shop who claims to do data recovery and refers stuff my way when they are unable. Here is what we found when we received it.

1. The drive only has a very small amount of bad sectors
2. Someone formatted the main partition on Saturday

I called the client to ask if she minded me calling the tech to make sure that we had the correct drive, as it seems rather odd that a drive with a liquid spill would format itself in the process. She said that the spill happened more than a week ago and that it was with this local company at the time it was formatted.

In talking to the owner of the tech shop who did the work, it was confirmed that we do have the correct drive and because he couldn't find any data with GDB or other data recovery software, he decided to give into the system's request to format the drive. He said that the drive was in horrible shape and he had no choice but to format it. Still unable to find any data, he then referred the client to us.

I tried to tell him that it was a very bad move to format a drive that he wants to recover and that it will only make things worse, setting himself up to be sued. He said that it should have no affect on my being able to recover the data, he has done lots of recoveries and does not need my advice.

I go back and look at the drive further and start to notice that not a single file header is being found, implying that the drive is (was) encrypted. I call and confirm with the client that it surely was encrypted and she only knows the password. She doesn't know the name of the encryption program used and he past employer from whom she purchased the system is no longer in business.

Now the local tech has a huge issue. For the $20 he charged the client, she paid for him to not only try to recover her data, he most likely made it unrecoverable...at least at a price that she could afford. A basic $350 recovery is now going to cost thousands, if we are even so lucky as to figure out how to get to a point where we can enter the password to decrypt it. Will he pay for the costs for the recovery? Will he pay for the value of the data, if unrecoverable?

So, the irony to this is that this thread is focused toward Best Buy and Geek Squad messing things up and this is a case where they did the right thing and the local computer tech is the one who messed up.

When I give advice to "ALWAYS" clone a client drive before doing anything, it is to prevent the unusual cases like these from happening.

 

[OaksLabs]

I tried to tell him that it was a very bad move to format a drive that he wants to recover and that it will only make things worse, setting himself up to be sued. He said that it should have no affect on my being able to recover the data, he has done lots of recoveries and does not need my advice.

At my old job, my stone age manager would do quick formats and then run a simple file delete program to look for data. I told him that it was a bad idea....he never listened. [This guy also actually opened a customer's HDD that wasn't spinning to try to get the motor unstuck OUTSIDE OF A CLEAN ROOM. He's so behind with technology that he doesn't understand what the issue is...] I think a chunk of these horror stories are caused by people who don't understand the difference between high level and low level issues (and the misdiagnosis and mistreatment start from this misunderstanding).