Why did Acer overwrite my C drive during repair?

My laptop didn't turn on, so I submitted it to Acer for repair. The power button was replaced, and I got the laptop back. This took 3 weeks! Pretty annoying, but that wasn't the biggest problem.

When I turned it on, I noticed that they did reset my Windows installation, which means that I lost every personal file on my C drive, as well as my settings and programs.

The repair report only says that the power button was replaced, and that the device was reset to the defaults, but it says nothing about an SSD replacement or a damaged Windows installation. When I submitted it for the repair, Acer asked my Windows password, probably for testing purposes.

To me, it looks like standard procedure or something like that, but I only asked to repair the laptop, not to remove all my data and install the bloatware from the factory, so I'm pretty mad about it. Can anyone tell me why this was necessary?

Accepted answers

All comments

JackE

Sorry. You've posted to an ACER users group, not ACER employees or customer/warranty service reps,. So we can only guess that operating system corruption and/or EFI partition boot failure had also occurred. If you had installed a non-OEM system or generic Win10, this might've created other issues since OEM & generic system files aren't necessarily the same for the proprietary ACER mainboard. A good reason to regularly back up at least your personal data files on a stick every week or so.