First:
If your original drive is dead from a burnt controll board, any file on it are very probably lost for good.
Second:
Staples hardly qualify as a computer store. It's an office supply store. Their file recovery and restoration material and softwares are probably not upper class.
Finaly:
If the controller cirquit of the drive is burnt, then the computer just can't communicate with the drive.
Impossible to start the motor.
Impossible to move the heads to the correct track, and no way to initiate a read operation.
If the computer can't communicate with the drive, any data recovery programm just can't start reading any sector, making data recovery impossible, or at the very least, extremely hard.
You can't just switch the controler board of a drive with that of another of the same model, it always contains custom translation code tailor made for that particular unit.
The last resort is to connect a generic controller board and try a raw read of the drive to get an image of it's surface and, by analysing carefully the patterns, reconstruct the data.
It's an operation that can take several days or months, and does cost a LOT!
It demands the use of very specialised, and expensive, softwares, coupled with custom hardware.
Staples very probably don't have the equipment, and qualified technician, needed to perform that kind of data recovery.
Chances are they already tried to recover your data and failled.
Electro, April 2011
