Data Recovery Labs They are not truthful about the nature of the problem New York, New York

My computer suddenly stopped working with a  missing hal.dll errorr.  All of my research indicated either a virus, a corrupted or missing file, or a bad sector on my hard drive. I read various complicated recovery routines on Youtube but none of them to worked.  I found DataRecovery Labs who claimed they did recoveries for the large corporations so I figured they were legit. 

I was willing to pay a few hundred bucks if they could quickly fix my corrupted hard drive.  I shipped them my computer and they sent me a quote for $1549 and told me I had a bad hard drive. They also wanted to charge extra for a new hard drive (not included in the quote?). I told them to return my computer to me.  Luckily they returned it in a timely manner (I got it back in about a week). I knew my hard drive was not totally bad because I was able to boot up in DOS shell mode and examine files but the operating system would not let me do updates.

 

I then purchased the boot recovery software spotmau powersuite 2011.  The software will attempt to fix your problem. It didn't fix my problem but it did allow me to clone my entire hard disk to an external hard drive (so I didn't lose my data).  I then rebooted my machine and tapped on the F10 key to go into Windows recovery mode. I was able to do  a full recovery on my C drive (I have two partitions C & D).  I copied my data files from the external cloned drive and reinstalled my programs. All is well.  Total cost, $54 for the software and $60 for external hard drive.  And DataRecovery Labs wanted $1549. For what?