Hard drive stolen by a repair technician.

Hello,

I obviously do not know your repair technician, but I doubt he would take the risk, given the prices he gets for new hard drives, to steal one during a replacement.

He might have mistaken yours for another client's disk when returning it, but considering the cost of labor, it would have been more expensive for him to make a copy of your data rather than return the disk as you entrusted it to him.

The first thing to do would be to check if the returned disk is indeed 500 GB, which also raises doubts about the point of substituting it with a disk of equal capacity.

It is also possible that some of your data was spread across different partitions and that the technician did not bother to search for and recover it.

To my knowledge, it is recommended to make a copy or ask the repair technician to do so before any changes, but for that, you need to trust him to some extent, which is clearly not the case here.

Finally, I doubt that Acer would bother to answer your question if the factories are not in contact with the end consumer, but I could be wrong about their availability.

You should have recorded the references for each of your components since the problem may recur with each failure.

In short, I don't see how to obtain information through software or integrated utilities on an absent component, but one of the participants might have an idea.

Best regards

Thank you for your long responses; unfortunately, they do not answer my question, which is more technical than anything else.
To be more precise, my question mainly concerns how to find out the references of both the currently installed internal hard drive and the external hard drive he returned to me, as well as the references of the other elements of the machine, such as the processor, motherboard, etc., so that I can try to prove that he did not return the internal hard drive that I gave him.
As for the rest, I must admit that I do not understand the purpose of his maneuver. But it happens that, since I am a bit paranoid about data loss, I systematically make complete backups of my most important folders. The last one, on the morning of the day I went to see him, so there is no issue in itself, just the concern that personal financial data is out there. And also, for the principle. What is the hard drive he returned to me?

I answered very precisely that, in my opinion, I don't see how to obtain information via software or integrated utility on a missing component. The dxdiag command (in cmd) allows you to list and archive the ID of installed components and devices, but since you claim that the repairman stole not only the data but also the disk, you will only be able to use it for the two disks currently in your possession.

Knowing the references of the returned hard drive cannot ensure that it is yours. You will not be able to prove (legally, I suppose) that it was stolen from you.

The only ways to prevent a third party from accessing your data are encryption (with its risks of loss or corruption, or even remote reading by the software publisher) or systematic backup on a removable hard drive.

Hello, since you have part of your data, in my opinion, it's yours.

See with the technical sheet of the model maybe.

Hello,

There are two things you could do:

1) Use Recuva on the old drive to search for traces of deleted files and possibly recover what you are missing.

2) Check the contents of this drive in Linux. I'm thinking of this solution because I have an old hard drive that cannot be read under Windows but works perfectly in Linux.
Use a live distribution that does not require installation on the computer.
You can use Linux Mint, which is lightweight.
The detailed operations are here. Once Linux is up and running, you connect the enclosure that contains the hard drive.

Hi,
Something quite simple, on hard drives there is usually a manufacturing date marked, see if it roughly corresponds with the purchase date of the PC (that is to say before) and you will know if it is indeed your disk.
SMART data can also indicate the number of hours the disk has been operating. But this data can be modified with specialized software.
--
What are our differences? They are our greatest chance to open ourselves to life. (Roland Poupon)

The serial number of the computer can be found on the label underneath the computer.

For information about hard drives > crystaldiskinfo

As I told you, the model can be found either on or under the computer, or in "system information"

You can use cpu-z to get information about the processor, motherboard, RAM, and graphics card

But as I mentioned, only the model and the serial number are useful...

Thank you all.
I have indeed returned the computer and found the serial number, or even the identifier. Among these references, one of these numbers may correspond to the manufacturing date, MFG date: 1103, which is March 2011 corresponding to the acquisition date, October 2011 (I was able to find my order preparation slip, lacking the invoice).
Moreover, I dismantled the external hard drive case, since I had asked him to take the internal hard drive to make it an external drive. And the label on this disk indicates February 2011. So, apparently, it matches. HDD -> 02/2011, computer -> 03/2011, delivery -> 10/2011. So as far as I'm concerned, I'm in a bad position to demonstrate anything, unless I imagine that he kept a hard drive aside to replace mine, or that he removed the label from one to put it on the other. Somewhat far-fetched. Or check that the data extracted from the examination of the HDD is indeed the same as that on the label; and then, how to access it?
But in any case, where did my folders and files go? It's a real mess.
I will follow each of your advice.
Thank you all.

Bingo! Well done Jumulka! They are indeed there! But well hidden, so to speak. I take off my title and quickly mark my question as resolved. What a lot of anxieties and wasted time. If this can serve as a lesson to all those who change their DD, it will be a win.
Thank you all for your help.

Hello,
Aren't you the one who made a mistake and deleted those missing files? You need to stop being paranoid: what would this repair person want with your data and why would they target deletions by date?
You're wasting your time trying to piece your computer back together, but if you have the serial number assigned by Windows to your original drive, the command wmic diskdrive get serialnumber under cmd will give you its current number.