Shipped off Envy 17 3200 CTO for LCD replacement, service center reimages drives to factory spec for no apparent reason?

I had shipped out my Envy 17 3200 CTO on Thursday of last week to HP's depot repair facility to fix an issue with my LCD display. The system was purchased back in July and has been running flawlessly without any issues, save one issue. Also had a 3-year on-site CarePack purchased with the system. The display went all black twice in a row when I moved the LCD panel back by the left LCD hinge. The system went unresponsive when this happened and I was forced to power-cycle the system to get it back. Happened a third time, though this third time, the display had rainbow color bars on-screen, like you'd see on an old TV test pattern except horizontal. I also asked them to check the user access panel on the underside of the laptop as it seems to be loose far more often than it should be.

Called into the Envy support line and set up a return-to-depot repair because I assumed it was going to be system board, display cable, LCD or some combination thereof. System board repairs and some other repairs are depot-only, so off it went via one-day shipping. Box arrived on the 24th, shipped out the same day, arrived on the 25th.

Received an email today that it was repaired, and they replaced part number 669725-001 / HU - FLUSH GLASS. No idea what that was, so called HP support and asked what it was. Apparently, this was the LCD panel and the cause of the issue.

I continued talking with the HP rep this morning and found out they did a data transfer on my laptop. In the paperwork that came with the shipping box, there was a piece of paper to ask about doing a data transfer and I told them I didn't need one. I had backed the unit up with Windows 7 image backup before I shipped it out, though that was a "what did they do to my laptop??!?!" CYA move. Since this was a display issue and the worst case scenario, they'd swap LCD + display cable + system board, though would never need to do anything to the drives for data recovery or backup.......... or so I thought. More on that momentarily.

After getting nowhere with the tech support rep to ask why a data transfer was done on the laptop, I ended up calling the case manager assigned to the repair. There was a case manager assigned because when the laptop showed up on the 25th, nothing was updated in the status to show that receipt, nor any updates over the weekend or on Monday. They checked into it and found that there was an input error for receipt of the laptop on their end and it was in queue to be repair.

The assigned case manager wasn't available at that moment, though one of their associates was. They checked on the notes for the repair and found out that the system was reimaged back to factory spec. Now, the original config of the system was with a 750GB hybrid drive as the only drive, as well as running Windows 7 Ultimate. As you can see from my signature, it's been updated to Windows 8, 16GB of RAM and has a mSATA Crucial m4 as its boot drive, plus an added Samsung PM830 as a D:\ drive for games with the 750GB drive now as the E:\ drive. The associate case manager handed me off to the original case manager, who was more than happy to explain to me that the service center apparently decides to reimage systems whenever they want, even if they're explicitly told not to do so. Supposedly, they reimage systems by default to troubleshoot the issue, though that made absolutely no sense for an obvious hardware error and not a driver/OS/application issue. To add to the mess, there was nothing discussed by the initial technician that the system might be reimaged back to factory spec in any way and the only thing about any possibility for data loss was the usual "please back up your data before sending it in". Nothing in the included paperwork that the system could possibly be reimaged, nothing on the HP website about it, nothing anywhere did this come up even as a remote possibility.

To put it bluntly, I was anything but pleased about this turn of events. I had a very well-working system with a new Windows 8 install that I have configured just the way I want it, and I can only wonder how it'll be when I get it back tomorrow. It's supposedly going to be shipped back today and I should get it back tomorrow. Best case scenario would be that I boot off my Windows 8 Recovery disc, restore the system from the Windows 8 image backup done to an external hard drive and it'll be back to normal before it was shipped out. Worst case scenario, my image backup won't restore and I have to rebuild the system from scratch, including upgrading to Windows 8 again. Not counting the possibility of getting one or more missing components from the system when it comes back, of course, such as RAM or a SSD.

I have a request to the case manager to contact the service center and ask them:
1) Why did they reimage a system that had no need to be reimaged because it was an LCD replacement only?
2) Why did they not contact me to ask me about reimaging the system or bring it up at any time before doing it?
3) What possible diagnosis was needed to be done on the system that reimaging the system became a requirement to do that troubleshooting?
4) Why is it "normal" practice to reimage a system to factory spec when it's obviously not needed?

So, just as a reminder before sending in a system to HP depot repair, back up the entire system, not just the data. Use Ghost, TrueImage, Windows 7 Image backup, something to get a complete image of the system from top to bottom. It's likely you might get back a system that isn't the way you sent it in and is back to factory spec.

I'll update this when I get the system back tomorrow, or next week if they decide to delay shipping it back today for some obtuse reason.

 

Looks like someone in the repair chain is a complete idiot.

Received my system back today, after multiple people in the repair chain said that it was reimaged, and it was just as I left it. No issues at all with missing data or reimaged drives.