The owner, puzzled at first, then visibly frightened, has no answer. He does not know whether the hard drive inside the laptop is yours or not. You are puzzled. Why switch out the hard drives when he could just as easy make a disc image of your hard drive and transfer the data that way? But of course, what is easy and sensible is not always most profitable for him. He begs you to give him some time to work out what has happened to your data, but, he says, he is confident that whatever the status of your hard drive, he should be able to restore everything to the way it was. Skeptical, you leave the store. Your wife has already decided that you are screwed, but you are attempting to remain dispassionate. Apparently, the laptop has experienced some travel over the weekend. its one shortcoming in matching up to your old system is an inferior model optical drive. It was sent to the facility on the other side of town to have one installed.
Strangely, some unnamed employee (who, we are assured, has been summarily fired) has taken it upon himself to format the hard drive, assuming perhaps that this is a recycle job, although there are no such instructions on the work order. Your precious memories... your irreplaceable documents, business contacts, music collected over four years... all of it gone. And why? Because you were stupid enough to take a computer repair service at its word that it would respect your data, what would seem to be the absolute bottom line expectation of any repair service from here to karachi, that in simply repairing your monitor they not reformat your hard drive. Or that they would keep a backup in case of this sort of rare error. By the end of the work day, meaning today, if i do not have satisfaction, I will publish the name of this store here and everywhere else possible. I will additionally take legal action. I will additionally construct a voodoo doll and commence needle insertion.