[tgflynn]

> Could this be a self-destructing laptop by design of Oydisen Electronics?

That seems like a very paranoid take. Electronics sometimes fail early in life and to the best of my knowledge requiring returns for refunds is standard operating procedure.

That said I understand you not wanting to return a device that has unencrypted sensitive data on it.

Some things you might want to consider in the future are:

1) Enabling full drive encryption before saving any sensitive data to a device.

2) Not buying laptops with non-removable SSD's.

The laptop doesn't have to be a total loss though. I have a laptop with a flaky HDD and I run if entirely off of a Linux system installed on a 512 GB USB 3.0 thumbdrive that you can buy for less than $100. I'm sure it's far from the performance of an internal SSD but it works fine for my needs.