MATRIX MONTANA RETAIL PARK - PATHETIC SERVICE

I have supported Matrix Warehouse for many years and have purchased way over a hundred thousand rand of goods and services from them. As my supplier of choice, I have always taken my equipment to Matrix for repairs and upgrades. In about July / August 2018 I purchased a Dell laptop. Thursday 23rd July, I took the laptop to Matrix Montana to replace the hard drive with a SSD hard drive. I requested that the previous hard drive be placed in a drive enclosure as I needed to access the data on the drive. I repeatedly told the technician that the data was extremely important as I needed to copy the data to the new drive. The technician agreed to do that. Later that day the technician phoned me to request the Recovery Key to the previous drive. That was the first time I was told about BitLocker and that it had been activated on the drive. I was told that the Recovery Key was listed in the Microsoft Account of the person who was registered as administrator on the laptop. I provided him with the credentials to log in to the Microsoft Account. When I went to collect the laptop he told me that he couldn’t unlock the drive. The result is that I cannot access my extremely important documents. The only response I received when I confronted Matrix with this is that they provided a copy of the procedure to follow to unlock BitLocker BEFORE the existing hard drive is removed. Matrix is a Dell retailer and should have known that Windows 10 automatically enables BitLocker when installed on a Dell laptop. Their technician should have known that he had to follow the correct procedure before removing the hard drive. I should have been provided with the Recovery Key and a written warning that the hard drive was locked and encrypted when I bought the laptop. This pathetic service by Matrix has resulted in a serious loss to me.