Sure. Now back to reality: most of the customers who bring their notebooks in the shop would pay 50 Euros or somewhat to get their holiday photos back, but not more. Furthermore, most of these hdds are either beyond repair or have only logical or minor surface defects.
I don't want those candidates on my bench, so the guys in the shop make an image of the hdd as soon as the customer agrees to buy a new hdd and pay for some basic efforts to get some data back.
Afterwards, it would be helpful to know which files are actually damaged to decide whether a Windows repair, a system file check or a complete installation is required and which data can be safely recovered.
Why should we let the customer leave the shop without any attempt to get their stuff back at a low price or, on the other extreme, always recommend a multi-hundred-euro job when there are lots of possibilities in between that are more than sufficient for 90 percent of our customers?
Now it's your turn
PS. by the way you misunderstood my first posting: we would never run a tool on a bad hdd which tries to write or "repair" anything, the last guy who used chkdsk /f at first on any hard disk had to leave months ago. We only want a tool to check the disk for bad sectors and tell us which files are affected after making an image.