I recently had my external hard drive stolen, and I just found out that the thief is showing it off to people. A friend of mine managed to ask the guy to lend him the drive, and when I saw it, I recognized it immediately. However, the hard drive has been formatted, so I can't access any of the data to prove it's mine. All I have is my word saying it's exactly like my hard drive.
I have some tools like Recuva to try and recover data and USB History Reporter, but that one isn't working for me. I've even gone through the Windows Event Viewer and the Registry to check previous USB connections, but it's all a bit overwhelming. I'm in desperate need of assistance—how can I establish that this drive belongs to me?
3 Answers
You should really look into the serial number for warranty purposes or check for any purchase receipts. Without any of that, claiming it might be quite difficult, unfortunately.
Honestly, if you don’t have the serial number or the receipt, it's tough. But if you are absolutely certain it's your drive, maybe consider just keeping it. What could the thief possibly do about it?
You might want to give TestDisk a shot to see if it can recover any lost partitions or data. Just keep in mind if the thief used advanced tools to wipe the drive, it might be tough to recover anything. Without a receipt or serial number, it’s going to be a hard fight for proof.
Yeah, that's my next step. I doubt they had a deep understanding of data erasures. They probably just formatted it!