ASUS fucking destroyed my laptop

That sucks, it is time you buy an external HDD for backups. And occasionally backup your work, like once a week, if you are doing alot of work with the computer, or every couple of days. You should even get 2 drives for backups, incase one gets corrupted.

I've had my old laptop crack the screen during highschool, i sent it to repair at the local store, person there repaired it fairly quick and did not mess around with my stuff. Perhaps you should do this next time you have a problem. Check your local technician store for repairs, you can also try repairing yourself if you feel like you can do it.

As for being scammed, we live in a world like that 24/7. I got scammed by another local store recently too because i was sold a crappy PSU unit, that i used for 11 months and it died, when my previous one worked like like 9 years. Supposedly the PSU by EU law, has to be sent back to repair and/or send a new replacement unit. The dude that sold me the PSU and applied it to my desktop, took a fee of 100€ to do the entire thing. And he refused to accept that the PSU was faulty 11 months later, saying it was one of the best in the market, sold thousands of them with no problems. He was now blaming the motherboard, previous PSU died probably because it was too much stress handling a 1080ti along with other stuff, it started acting weird when i started using valve index. This PSU he put in my pc, gave the exact same issue as the previous one, except i never used VR. So in the end, i got scammed 100€, i have a faulty PSU (i could have pressured the person to return it, but i did not do that and instead i will avoid the store in the future). I bought a much better PSU for 80€ recently... i literally went from a bad tier PSU to one of the best in the market right now and it costed less somehow. Makes you wonder how much of a rip off i got from the deal uh?

I had a hard drive take a sudden nose dive. I was long overdue a backup and had data very important to me on that disk. Windows wouldn't even recognize the disk. I tried everything I could think of. I tried every rescue program I could find mentioned online. Nothing worked. Until I tried DM Disk Editor and R-Studio (both about $50 US). Both were able to recover most of my files. But one was better than the other.

One recovered "everything"
One recovered "everything" but... lost much of the folder structure (many folders were simply dumped into the root directory) and abbreviated many folder names (think long file names reduced to the old 8.3 format to have an idea of what happened).

At this point I am unsure which was which but I believe this is correct based upon my incomplete notes but I believe DMDE (DM Disk Editor) was the winner.

Again, my disk suffered partition destruction etc. I am not sure what a factory reset would do, but I THINK among other attempts to salvage my data I had done a factory reset. No promises, but if you don't find a local data recovery shop and have $50US, I'd recommend giving one of these two rescue applications a try.

My condolences. I hope you can use their ass for damages.

Oh, damn. So sorry to hear that.

This actually reminds me of something that happened around 8 years ago, or less... maybe 2015? My little brother had an HP laptop, a very nice-looking gaming laptop. They were like bread and butter, inseparable. One day the laptop stopped working properly, especifically, the keyboard stopped working. All you could do was turn it on and off, and use a USB mouse. The system didn't detect the keyboard, or something like that. I don't remember the details, but something happened to it and less than 2 days later it was like that. So, I decided to contact HP since the laptop was like 1 year old and no more than 2, for service. They gave us instructions what was needed, how has to be boxed and where to send it. Less than a week later I was sending it to them, but before that, I took an extra-precaution. It was the first time I was doing something like that, so I didn't trust them completely. I made a backup in an external hard drive of everything my brother had or looked important: videos, photos, pictures, homework, savegames, music, bookmarks, other files. Everything created using that laptop, before I sended it.

They only needed to replace the keyboard, right? That's what I thought they would do. And did, except for one thing. When I had the laptop back, I found they also did the same it happened to you: they factory-reset the whole laptop.

At first I was a little shocked they would do that, then relieved when I remembered that I made backups of everything before. Just because of that, I didn't bring hell and fire to them... and it wasn't even my laptop! But anyway... so meanwhile my brother was in school (he was in high school during that time) and before he'd arrived, I restored everything in its place and installed the basics I knew he used. When he got home, he was really happy to see it back. He was surprised too that everything was back to default, but he took it well when he found everything was in its place thanks to the backup. He later customized everything to his taste, and installed some missing games or something.

Like a week later, I was contacted by HP to ask for an evaluation of the service. I told them my real opinion, why would they do that?, reset everything when they only needed to replace the keyboard. The answer was something like, it was a policy or something, they always do that when some change needed to be done to the system, that they use master discs or something like that (can't remember), to reset everything with updated drivers to make sure the new hardware was working properly. And they didn't say sorry, by the way. They also said that if the user asked for the main drive to not be erased, they always suggests to make backups before the repair service because not always is possible to do that. They will reset everything most of the times, that it was a common practice, to make sure everything worked fine before send it back. So to me, that answer to that was like, "So they (the tech guys) don't want to waste time, they just install and run a factory reset to save time?" And the answer was, "Affirmative."

That experience showed me that, even for the high prices they charge, they don't care about the customer at all. They just want to do the job quickly and charge high, to make more money easily. So for next time, it's better to find someone trustworthy to do the job for you, or just research a little and do it yourself, it'll be quicker and cheaper.

The sad thing was, less than a year later, my brother was mugged one Saturday morning when going to school for some project. One guy beat him from behind and took his backpack, with the laptop inside. Damn SOB... That event broke my brother's heart for a while, he actually cried that morning, and not from the punches he received. It took years for him to own another laptop again and feel safe with it. After that event some months later or a year later when he graduated, I built for him a gaming desktop PC. Because the laptop was red, I used a red tower for him. He still have it, but rarely use it to play games there now. He's more a PlayStation/Switch type of gamer now, but that's another story.

My point is, after that experience with HP, and I don't know if they still do it, like I said, this was some years ago: NEVER TRUST THE SERVICE TECH GUYS, you may find a professional who cares or a jackass, and ALWAYS BACKUP EVERYTHING IMPORTANT TO YOU. In the instructions they told me to make everything accesible, and that included passwords, their preference was to delete them. I found that odd, because they can access your data anyway, or worse, destroy it when annoyed or to save time, with a factory reset. So always backup your most important data, or maybe, just unplug your hard drives and keep them, if you can or are allowed to do that instead (I wasn't).

Again, spookypannkaka, sorry to hear it happened to you too. I hope you can find a way to restore your data, or at least, make them pay for what they did. The sooner you contact them for it, the better. Maybe they can restore the data for you or help with it. The longer you have your hard drive working, the less chance you have to restore your data, because of the drive reading and writting on it.

Take care, and good luck.

Yes, they will factory reset. Maybe you can still recover the files if you have cloud save.

Jesus Christ that sucks.

I'm very sorry to hear this.

I am not sure what you have tried and what not but a rule of thumb is that you should never install anything on the drive if you want to recover your files. They might still be recoverable. You might want to try using tools as Recuva, DiskDigger, EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard, R-studio. Especially R-studio (the demo version) and DiskDigger, it helped me in the past. Install from another laptop/pc to a usb and run them from there. If nothing helps then there's plenty of companies that do data recovery, but that's last resort.

EDIT: Technically, a fresh install of Windows 10 + all their programs would take around 20-25GB, and if your data wasn't overwritten by most of those GB's then you have pretty good chance of recovering the data. Plus most of the laptops now have SSD's, and if you do then there's even bigger chance of recovering data, because the hardware controllers are designed to maximize coverage and minimaze rewrites.

Sorry to hear about your data, you can try using an external monitor and one of the software mentioned above from bitcoin, but I doubt they will find much. The new screen should have its own warranty, so if it's broken just contact Asus again and ask for a free repair or replacement this time, and if they can't or don't want to ask for a full refund and threat legal action.

I did have backups, but still lost everything because my house was flooded & the backup drive was underwater just the same as my PC ... Thankfully I had copies of various parts of my files stored in other drives, burned to CD/DVD/Bluray discs etc., Google Drive, Google Photos library that kind of stuff. Had all of my passwords in a password manager on my phone. So not a 100% loss but still there are files and photos and I will never get back and that makes me sad. Up until then I had managed to migrate all of my data across computers for years and years. I had projects I worked on as a teenager, photos from my wedding, huge mp3 collection, all kinds of things that are gone forever.

Professional data recovery services (the kind who disassembles the hard drive and removes the platters etc.) charge thousands of dollars. If it's an SSD and they did a secure erase there's no way to recovery anything, the encryption keys get changed.

A $50 portable USB hard drive will be plenty of backup space for most people. Copy all your important stuff to it and give it to a trusted person to hold at their house. Even if it's a year later you'll be glad to have a year-old backup rather than nothing at all.

It is very unfortunate.
I have seen people who have consulted with SG about the same thing before sending it in for repair.
Perhaps a similar example can be found in the hardware category...

This is a common story in computer repair.
In some countries or regions, it is not possible to perform backups with data protected for reasons of privacy protection.
Repair companies used to be able to choose to perform repairs with the maximum amount of data remaining, but there is nothing that can be done about it.

What should we have done?
It might have been a good idea to make a backup of the data with an external output from the laptop to a PC monitor or TV, etc., and then send it to the repairer.
　Usually, there should be a statement or explanation of data erasure in the terms and conditions at the time of acceptance by the repair company. If they did not, you may want to consult with the Consumer Affairs Agency as a fraud or inappropriate response.

I mean... That sucks of course, but it's kind of your fault too. How do you send all your data somewhere without backing it up first? What if the laptop got lost in shipping?

As for the wasted money, if you don't get anything out of Asus support and if you paid with a CC, just open a charge back. ASUS clearly didn't provide the services you paid for. I would also file a claim with the Better Business Bureau, if Asus is registered there.

i subscribe to a cloud backup file service so i dont have to worry about data wipe, computer break, external harddisk break and whatnot.

noted for my next laptop purchase

I'm really sorry to hear this. 😥 Their fix should come back in full as refund and whoever was "repaired" it should get some serious scolding. It's unacceptable to pay that amount to fix a laptop when it probably costs an entire laptop or half of that nowadays.

I've never fixed Laptops before, and replacing a screen may be out of my league, but anything Desktop PC, I do it myself. I hope you never have to deal with such a situation and you get some sort of compensation for the damage, physical and emotional.

leave a horrible review, companies usually react to keep their corporate image "clean".
also threaten to sue them.

Ok, first of all - this is very shitty, and I'm very sorry this happened to you!

Hindsight is always 20:20, and as other already mentioned, you always need to keep and external storage nearby (external drive, a large disk-on-key, etc) for the important stuff. You don't need to backup the windows installation or the Steam games, but you probably want your "My Documents" folder backed up. Another good solution people now use is cloud backup. And you can even do both.
And it has nothing to do with Asus.
There can be a disk failure, a flood, a power surge... A million different things can happen that will cause you to lose your data.
It's always a good idea to have a backup every week or so.

And especially when sending a laptop for repair.
What if they replaced your entire laptop for a new one (out of the kindness of their heart)?
What if they upgraded your HDD/SSD free of charge?
Even the best intentions could have lead to these results.

Another situation where you don't need backup, if you keep everything in the cloud.
It's very common today to keep documents in google docs, google sheets, microsoft 365, etc.
Projects in Github.
Files in Dropbox.
Emails in Gmail/Outlook
etc.
In my work laptop for example, 99% of all data is stored in the cloud.
I could replace the entire hard drive, and will hardly notice.
This is also a solution.

In the immediate future, I can tell you Asus probably did a quick format, which takes a few seconds.
And not a full format, which takes minutes/hours.
Which means your data is retrievable using home means (i.e. unformat applications).
Even in worse case scenario - if they did a full format, it's still salvageable, but you will need to go to a professional lab for that.
Look at the bright side:
At least they didn't replace your hard drive.
Then you would really be screwed...

Well... shit.

From my experience with repairing various stuff I can tell you that there are people who can do magic. Fun fact - none of them works in official support.
Shitty support is also part of company selling strategy. A lot of people would just buy new product if official support will say that their hardware is fubar.

That said- you should do backup before sending them anything. I learned it in the same way as you xD Not much to do now, just treat it as valuable life experience xD

View attached image.

Unfortunate business.
But at least as far as I have noticed service centers always point out that no personal information or files should be on a device when it's sent in as they most likely go through standard procedures and they are not responsible for the files... So I wouldn't even really blame this on asus... apart form maybe not making it clear to you that it will be wiped.

But as for the screen - you must have had some kind of agreement on payment or having it serviced right ? Isn't there some consumer protection agency or whatever in your country ? Friend of mine once bought a tent which arrived with a hole in it from shipping. The online store, instead of providing a replacement or giving the money back, sent a youtube video over on how to patch a hole in a tent. After contacting consumer protection agency the store suddenly woke up and sent back the money immediately. Awesome thing living in EU - at least consumers are relatively protected from scumbags in business. But you do have to make a fuss yourself as they mostly try to benefit from people who don't want to deal with stuff like this

Although depends if you sent it to be fixed to local service center or somewhere abroad. But I would suggest bringing up the contract or whatever deal you have signed (could be also "distance contract" which comes in force once payment is completed) because there has to be something as they probably want to protect themselves from legal problems as well. And if you have a document or emails stating that it will be replaced then they could catch shit for this.

I personally once had a Sony phone which had faulty screen and eventually it broke from itself (literally cracked in front of me while sitting on desk). I found official Sony release saying that under specific conditions it may happen and they replace the screen in such a case. Unfortunately that was only done by Sony itself, but we didn't have Sony service centers in my country... the dealer I bought it from without even checking the phone stated I broke it as their contract does not respect cracked screans... So might be a dead end if it's serviced by someone else instead of Asus themselves... or if it's sent abroad. Because there might be different contracts which state different things between asus and their service provider and you with asus/service.

Either way might prove worthy to check into the contract and any legal stuff that might help you. And a tip for anyone - if absolutely necessary don't ever pay to anyone anything without a contract or any kind of document stating what the payment is for and what happens if result is unsatisfactory. It can go well until it doesn't.

Rest in potato, poor laptop. Was it at least your computer or did they just send the same model? (I heard this happened with Nintendo handhelds before, where instead of bothering to replace the battery they just supplied a new device instead.)

But fucking factory reset for a hardware problem? Not to sound like a twitter teen but I can't even. Wish I had a way to help ya.

As ypu are speaking in €, if you are from Europe you can take the law and make them repair that broken screen if they don't want to get sued. The facc tory reset thing is pretty cvommon in any elechtronic device.

I kinda see the point of factory reset, many problems might be software issues so resetting device and running diagnostics could solve them or point there is no issues. For actually physical screen damage still makes less sense.

This is simply horrible :/

Try R.saver, it may be able to restore some of your files.