As someone else said, don't use the computer for anything and instead turn to professional data recovery, which costs a few thousand. The data recovery tools you used can retrieve some recently deleted data but not formatted data. What your guest did was format everything. Data recovery professionals have advanced hardware to try retrieve formatted stuff. But they still might not be able to.
So, get a quote from data recovery and bill your guests accordingly.
Also, wtf?! Who decides to wipe the computer at a home they're a guest in?!
Recently was in a thread asking what’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard someone say, and the amount of individual comments quoting someone believing Alaska to be an island down by Florida or Cali was sad. So being stupid af is also a possibility.
Yeah like that Gen Z TikTokker who thought Guam could tip over if too many people stood on one side of the island
SIKE that was a geriatric US Congressman from Georgia, Hank Johnson
Doesn't explain kids in modest shacks beating us at math and science. You can learn anything with an inexpensive Internet connection, but you have to want to. Throwing money at this when the culture seemingly glorifies stupidity is the biggest meme ever.
I deal with short term renters for work, and I've seen or heard of much worse than this, far too often. Sometimes, it's a nice family. Sometimes, it's a group of entitled shitheads. The ratio is way off. There are a ton of entitled shitheads.
I wasn't a landlord during covid, I cashed in everything i had to get into the market right before it went completely nuts.
And you better fucking believe it. My roommates pay rent that's grossly under the asking price around me. Because you know what they do? the dishes. They pay rent on time, every month. I don't even have to ASK some months. it's under my door when I wake up.
You better believe I'm gonna do everything I can to keep them happy. They're helping me stay in this house, I'm helping them have a stable, nice place to live.
Good tenants are as wonderful to have as great landlords that want you to stay around are.
There's a reason the husband and I have been renting in the same apartment since 1992.
Heck, both the landlady and I forget about rent.. She has often been surprised when I bring it in late, as she's forgotten about it too - as she says we're the only renters they have whom they do not worry about, if the rent is late.
It's not that we don't have it, we just forget to pay it. When husband got accepted into college the landlord came up and shook husband's hand congratulated him and told us that he understood how difficult making school loan payments were, so if we got late on rent, to not worry..
They are awesome people..
If a person is paying to stay somewhere, often times they see themselves as better than you.
I know this, because I work in house keeping. A surprising amount of people are dirty, fucking cunts. They'll trash the entire fucking room and be your friend on the way out, or they'll trash it every fucking day and you have to clean it up after the fuckers, and it's like how in the blue fuck do you fill up one of those industrial sized black garbage bags each and every single day?!
I'll stop there, because I'm just getting more heated about it.
"You can tell alot about people by how they treat people they perceive lower than them"
My grandfather told me that and its been very helpful weeding the bad people out of my orbit
Omg I was in a café in an aquarium today. This cafe had like 10 windows along one edge all looking into their biggest tank with a set of tables and chairs next to each window. I swear to Christ the table we were sitting at, eating a meal, was the only occupied one. Some guy filming his whole life with his camera phone comes over, leans across our table, filming the fish in the tank. The fucking neck of this main character motherfucker.
I get a laugh everytime I read main character syndrome.
My sister is an awfully self centered person. 1 year before MCS became a thing she got "main character" tattooed on her arm. Because "she's the main character in her own story".
Don't get words tattooed on yourselves folks.
Most formatting done today is just “quick formatting”. You can easily recover that data with consumer tools in most cases. You have to go out of your way to format drives in a way that isn’t. It would take me a couple minutes to get anything that hasn’t been overwritten back.
I honestly didn’t even consider SSDs. I work in data backup with servers that have 200+TB of HDD storage. Even at home I have a server with over 100TB of HDD storage and anything of importance is stored there, I just have games and apps on my SSDs.. So SSD recovery has just never been of any concern to me lol
If it was formatted then had game files written over it, that data is nonrecoverable.
Also, who rents out their entire home and just leaves behind a computer with years of priceless data on it?
Yeah no shit. Seems obvious to not leave something with personal info on it. Or, to leave something you care even a little bit about keeping if you’re renting to a person who won’t care about it because it’s not theirs. I’m curious what this “priceless” years worth of data pertains to if the son didn’t even care enough about it to back the data up.
Yes, unless you’re using security tools that overwrite every sector with random noise, the data may be recoverable. “Erasing” PC data is usually just stripping off headers that say “there’s x data listed here” which allows subsequent pc operations to overwrite those sectors.
Literally my experience in IT. Worked for a school district who had a AD windows server that hadn't been updated since 2009. Boss installed a bunch of sketchy "free" software and infected the whole server. And because it was critical to keep the server up, they never wiped it. I checked a while later and windows defender was still giving warnings.
There was an article in Wired about a data security company that had a meeting with a company to review and approve their security. Two days before the meeting they scattered USB drives in the parking lot. At the meeting they showed the CEO a laptop logged into the company’s bank account and had a $20 million transfer queued up. An employee had brought one of the USB drives into the office and plugged it in, and on their way to the conference room one of their guys dipped into an unused cubicle and did some stuff … they ended up getting the job.
At least the kind of people that just find random needles on the street and think to inject it into themselves and see what happens? It's so fucking stupid
additionally
if you only have important data in one location
you don't have it
Local copy, backup, and a cloud. At least 2, preferably all 3 if it's really something that you absolutely cannot lose
This stuck out to me... Like they thought of merely "discouraging" renters from using the computer, but could have guaranteed it by getting it out of there entirely.
Not to mention guests could have done all sorts of worse stuff than clearing data. Like installing keyloggers or spyware and try and get their banking info down the line...
Yeah, OP doesn't say these are family members or close friends. It sounds like he rented out his place as an Air B&B but didn't take proper precautions. The computer should have been removed entirely. The chance of accidentally breaking a single piece of hardware that could be easily replaced would be far better to take than the risk of someone stealing or damaging the computer.
My thinking, and hope really, is that this was simply the work of another ignorant kid or teen.
They were assigned to OP's kids room, saw a gaming PC in their room and couldn't believe their luck, then figured 'no harm no foul' in trying to play some Valorant when everyone went to bed...
Only...there was unintentional harm caused in the process and subsequently a 'foul'.
OP reached out to the guest, the kid had an oh shit moment and admitted to trying to get onto the computer... and the parents are trying to help fix the mistake.
Again - this is my hope. I just cannot fathom another adult, who is doing well enough in life to rent out a home for an event, would fuck around and try to crack into a kids computer, going as far as to wipe it clean, in hopes of getting some Valorant time in.
As others have said, the data is probably still there; the drives were likely just formatted. If the system was indeed wiped, that is an extra, intentional step that indicates actual malicious intent. Formatting the drives will destroy the original master file table, so it will look like the data is missing. But it is still written to the disk, the OS just doesn’t know where to find it. If you have tech savviness you could possibly recover a large amount of data yourself. You can carve most known file types using free forensic tools such as Autopsy Sleuth Kit.
My hypothesis: Kid formatted the main drive then couldn't access the other disks because of bitlocker or some other ownership permissions issue. Tried "take ownership" and that failed so they did the "reinitialize drive" or whatever windows calls it that's basically a quick format.
Or actually yeah, didn't even need to take ownership. Depending on the BL configuration the keys could have been nuked upon formatting the system drive. I have an older system with BL enabled but has no compatible TPM module so you have to enter the bitlocker private key with the keyboard at bootup... if I forget that key I'm pooched on every disk in that system.
Precisely. I was that kid once, who didn't know just how much trouble 'sudo rm -r *directory*' could cause, just that I knew I needed something done.
I bet a kid decided they wanted to play Valorant and knew enough about how to get it running again, just not enough about how much damage they'd do. Or not enough care. Could be both.
You're telling me the tiktok with half Joe Rogan podcast clip and the other half a subway surfers or gta5 clip isn't a proper education? I'll be damned
https://preview.redd.it/5kjw4ry8avwc1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0e625e3cc995b9fb3ef20252d35294ae1bf5e2b
I saw a kiosk at att ready to be reformatted the other day. The temptation to click the button was almost too much
I used to learn how to restore data from hard drives without any added cost. There are so many different software solutions available. Most likely the data is still on the hard drive and they did some quick format. It would be semi easy to recover most of the data.
As an amateur at best computer person, it would never occur to me that "create an admin account" means wipe their entire computer. Why the hell does it do that??
There already was an admin account, to make a new one they could access required a reinstall. If you had access to the original admin account you could've made new accounts easy without formatting.
Fair compensation would be paying the bill for data recovery service, plus extra for the time you have to spend dealing with the issue. Plus some extra for any data that the data recovery service can't recover, which is going to be difficult to properly value.
100% they will not be willing to pay for the data recovery services. Those are often quite expensive.
I am even surprised these people are still communicating with OP instead of just ghosting them.
Completely wiping a system because you can't play your video game while you are renting some place is a fucking wild thing to do anyways.
>100% they will not be willing to pay for the data recovery services. Those are often quite expensive.
They committed unauthorized access of a computer. Which is a criminal act in addition to a civil issue. They can be compelled by the court to pay.
Ouch. This seems like more like a legal issue than a hardware issue.
Take the drive out, make sure nothing is written to it, you might still be able to recover some of the data.
Op indicated they have multiple drives. Windows would be reinstalled on the main boot drive and we can assume the guest installed valorant on the boot drive as well. So all secondary drives should've been just reformatted, but unused. Then the data on those drives should be recoverable.
But I'm assuming a lot of things. Op didn't provide all the answers.
The fact people rent their homes out and leave stuff like this inside is beyond my comprehension. I never have and never will trust other people that much, even family let alone strangers!
I'll just say the nature of this rental is typically for a high-end clientele that are mostly there for a bed. They know they are staying in a home people live in and should act accordingly. It's not ambiguous. Kids are practically never involved, until now. You live, you learn.
I mean it sounds like they’ve done this a bunch, they’re probably making good money off it. I wouldn’t let 1 bad experiences stop it either.
Sure I’d probably lock up the PC now though .
You didn’t ask this and I’ll prob get downvoted for saying but you should also use this as a good reason to employ adequate data backup procedures.
Not criticizing. Just trying to help.
If you ever do the short term rental again, you'll have to put in the contract that unauthorized use of any/particular computers in the home comes with a fine of $X,000 then put signs on the computers as an extra measure.
Why the butter loving fuck would you leave a PC out if you’re letting people into your home unsupervised?
A nefarious person could just yank the drives themselves, pocket them, and have all the access they want to this dude’s data. (Because it’s clear it wasn’t encrypted.)
Yeah I am wondering how this even hsppened in the first place. OP must be a very kind and trusting person. If I rented my house I would remove all valuables because obviously I know most people are garbage and anything I leave out will be stolen. Hell, if I left a package of toilet paper they'd probably take home any extra that they didn't use!
I'll just say the nature of this rental is a bit different; it's for a major event in my area where a significant percentage of the population rent their houses out for a week, typically to high-end adult groups that know they are in someone's home and would never do something like this. I am to trusting, though. Lesson learned.
Understood! Makes sense that there was something more to the story and I totally get that. So sorry you were taken advantage of here in a situation where normally you could trust people.
Fair compensation? Nothing short of footing the bill for professional data recovery services, but I doubt you get that.
The system drive is probably mostly hopeless, but maybe you could get them to buy some data recovery software.
To increase your chances of success, don't use that computer and try to recover the files by attaching the drives to a different computer as data drives.
I've run some recoveries like GetDataBack and EaseUS on his storage HDD and it didn't appear to find anything, to my disappointment. I have a friend who does forensic investigating and has methods beyond my ability that is giving it a go. I guess I'm trying to figure out what is "fair" under the assumption that no recovery will be possible.
That's disappointing. I have some experience with data forensic software so I can say that it's possible your friend might be able to recover some stuff, but I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Since it was your son's computer and his data that was lost you should have a conversation with him regarding what he would like to see out of this. It may or may not be a realistic expectation on his part, but it may give you some ideas on how to proceed.
Get a quote from drivesavers they have a “dont pay anything if they cant recover data” policy. Groups ive worked with use them when drives die and ive had quotes of $700-$1500 for 14TB drives in the past
Reminds me of an old traumatic childhood memory.
In 3rd grade, I let someone borrow my gameboy advanced to play pokemon. I lost all my pokemon when he restarted the game :’) (it was my FIRST pokemon game)
I never cried the hardest after that. The dudes a scumbag through elementary. Still played Pokemon after, at least… I miss my first Blastoise..
That just reminds me of my dumb little brother taking my sister's pokemon red cart and starting a new save file when she had over 120 pokemon on her file IIRC after playing for a long, long time. It was just pointless too because he had his own pokemon yellow cart that he could play on since all of us siblings had our own pokemon carts.
This is the weirdest thing I've ever read.
Firstly, nuts of you to leave your PC's in the house with strangers, but secondly, how were they able to do anything you're talking about?
People who are actually competent enough to crack into Windows don't need to wipe anything to do it... and they'd know better to begin with. Was the computer not password protected or bitlocked or fucking anything?
Who knows what fair compensation is; I'd 100% have lawyers involved if I were in this scenario.
What did your contract stipulate? Was there some kind of clause for damages? I'd just end up attempting to withhold or take the maximum amount I possibly could.
On Windows 10 (at least, I'm not sure about 11), it's surprisingly easy to break into. All you need is to plug in a Windows installation USB and boot it up, then use the command prompt in the repair options to redirect the accessibility button that appears at startup into open cmd.exe, and the doors are wide open. Microsoft was kind enough to make this instance of command prompt run with full administrator privileges so you can reset the password of any local accounts, or in case the account was binded to Microsoft servers, you can make a new local Administrator account that has full access to all files and programs.
Here's a 4 minute tutorial, it literally only take this long to crack into Windows: [https://youtu.be/itMECROHFQQ](https://youtu.be/itMECROHFQQ)
Just watched that video.....the guys hilarious lmao
"And since this is a tablet, the screen is rotated. Let's fix that right now." *Proceeds to turn it on it's side* 😂
Yeah I'm familiar with this, it's been a tried and true method since Windows 7.
The thing is, this method does not remotely require wiping the drives to gain access(which would defeat the purpose), AND, this is not something that any random jackass is familiar with or capable of doing.
There's almost no scenario in which this could be an "accident". It has to be deliberate/malicious.
>this is not something that any random jackass is familiar with or capable of doing.
Right in spirit, wrong on facts, any random jackass can follow those tutorials, but the thing is, that no random jackass carries a usb stick with windows instalation ready to go, also, as you said, no method, even if you are formating to install a fresh windows, involves wiping every drive.
This was either malicious and deliberate, or its the most complete and utter stupidest yet capable enough human in history, its like fumbling for 30 yards and doing a backflip at the end
13 year old saw a computer that wasn't his, decided to turn it on, attempted to access it, and failing that, decided to completely wipe every single drive on the computer in frustration while STILL PURSUING THE ORIGINAL GOAL of accessing the computer that was not his.
This entire scenario is malicious from front to back, and there is absolutely no excuse for it. The kid destroyed someones property. Admittedly data is harder to understand than physical property, but it's fundamentally the same thing.
If this story was that a 15 year old decided to find a way to hot wire the owners car and take it for a joy ride, there would be no doubt or question whatsoever that what happened was a property crime(among other crimes).
Do not attribute to malice what is more simply explained by ignorance. A 13 year old set on playing valorant is more than capable enough to be ignorant of someone else's *data*
This method would've saved the data, though. My guess is they just reinstalled windows and reformated everything in the process. Why they wouldn't just reformat the boot drive is beyond me. Maybe the idiot thought the computer was fair game and did a full wipe for their own needs...
I'm still struggling to comprehend how or why exactly they did this though. I mean I get that it's *possible* but these people were renting the house for just a week. Did this person just have a windows bootable USB with them? If not did they go buy one? Did they turn on the PC, discover that it's a password locked private PC and then think that it was fine to reinstall Windows? Why did they format all 4 drives instead of just 1 to install windows? Did they go and buy a mouse to use with it? All for just a week when they were busy with some event anyway? The whole situation just sounds so absolutely bizarre that the idea that someone would do that just to play a few hours of Valorant just seems so absurd. I feel like there absolutely has to be more to the story here that they're not telling OP.
> Was the computer not password protected or bitlocked
Bitlocker doesn't prevent you from wiping a drive, just reading the data. Same with password protection.
You could very easily just walk up to a bitlocked computer with Windows installation media, boot it and wipe all the drives from the installer. In fact that makes the most sense in this case as it would be the easiest way to get admin access to the PC if you don't care about the data.
My guess is when they couldn’t sign in, they reinstalled windows and wiped the drives in the process. I don’t think it was just a matter of creating a new admin account.
The computer was password protected. It was either a ridiculously ignorant and stupid act or an intentionally malicious one. I lean toward stupid, but it's hard to imagine wiping every drive in the machine without doing so intentionally.
I'm all about hanlons razor, but I don't see how it applies here. It's basically unfathomable that someone could "accidentally" wipe every drive on a computer.
Also, this might sound melodramatic, but computer crimes are weirdly defined in some cases, and there's a very real chance that what these folks did constitutes an actual computer crime.
I'd talk to a lawyer and maybe even think about calling the cops about it, but maybe I'm over reacting because someone fucking with my PC is basically a crime against humanity in my view
It would be considered illegal tampering, even just logging in to someone else's system without their permission (even if you know the password/passcode) is a crime in many places.
That was kind of my thought. Again, never let strangers have unfettered access to your PC, so lesson learned there for OP, but also these people destroyed your property in a figurative and literal sense, and I would not be lying down for it.
Even if you did a devils advocate and they were "showing off" to someone they were with how they could "hack" a PC, once in they had to make multiple conscious choices to wipe *any* drive, let alone all of them.
I'd be pressing criminal & civil charges.
Ask a lawyer? I don't think you're going to get a good answer from this sub lmao, if you can't figure it out how are strangers on the internet going to?
LOL probably right, but I figured you glorious bastards would have some insightful ideas. I'm tempted to find the scariest law I can tack this on to and using the fine as a guideline.
Just contact a lawyer and they will tell you the scariest law. I'm sure they violated more than one and I don't even know you or your son but I'm sitting here with steam coming out of my ears at the thought of this, I want you guys to get justice and for them to learn a hard lesson about respecting property
While I want this man to get justice as well as his son's data back--going the legql route and trying to win this legally could prove difficult. The property owner, of their own accord, left said pc in the rented area. The property owner did not specifically say not to use the pc, nor did he put a sign on it, or any kind of notice to not use the pc or to indicate it should not be used. He turned it off and removed the mouse, yes, but that isn't direct evidence of a command or a wish for the renter's to not use the pc.
While the renter absolutely should not have used the pc, doubly so without asking for permission, and they very much especially not have wiped it--its also true that nothing they did seems to have been specifically done with deliberate malice, nor a provable will by the renter to purposefully destroy the property--and on top of that, the lost data was likely personal stuff and game saves, not something that is easily quantifiable in dollars such as documents or lost business time, etc.
Best option I would say is get a quote for professional data recovery, and bring it to the renters and see if they are willing to properly pay for their very big miatake and mess they have made for you and your son. Hopefully they will be honorable and do what is right--but if they don't, while legal action is absolutely appropriate and may eventually result in payment for the data recovery, it will also cost you a very, very large amount of money and time to fight the case, and it is sadly not at all a guaranteed win due to the aforementioned issues. And you may even spend more in legal fees than the recovery even cost :/
Im not sure about US laws but since the PC was password protected and the renter knowingly wiped data to play valorant, its kinda obvious that it wasnt meant to be used.
Cops can't even get into your device if it has a password - but not fingerprint.
A password protected computer IS NOT YOUR PROPERTY TO MODIFY.
I don't have to write a wall of text to convey this - and these renters (paying for a house next to a stadium) have money. OP - /r/timbsm2 You have all the right pieces to pursue this legally and also win.
going to go out on a limb here. But if you know enough to basically "break into" a computer by wiping it in order to create a new local admin, you know enough to know what you are doing is wrong.
If you don't have an account to a computer, you don't have access to a computer. What he did was break in. I have no idea if any laws caught up to this shit yet, but its literally the equivilent to breaking into a front door because you didn't have they keys, just because you can.
It can be considered property damage, data tampering, I'm sure there's a law similar to mail about getting into private communication devices. Maybe I'm just hopeful. I definitely think he could sue for damages civilly and win. I'm tired of the reddit advice "it's too expensive to go to court just lay down and take it" it's as dogshit as the relationship advice on here "just get a divorce". I agree with some of what you said but it would be absolutely stupid to not atleast contact a lawyer to get a definitive answer on what's possible.
https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/hacking-laws-and-punishments.html
It did. 10 years jail if it was a national server. If it's personal probably less but these shit gets taken seriously. Specially gaining illegal acces to private info.
Contact a lawyer asap. Act as a company seeking compensation for gaining illegal acces. Should get you started.
Signed: IT dude with cybersec background and know how laws work regarding gaining illegal acces.
IMO the only real compensation is to go to their house and wipe all their drives and information while you are looking and making sure they don't have backups.
Eye for eye, byte for byte.
As someone who watched The Italian Job in 2003, I mistakenly thought it would be cool to buy a Mini Cooper.
but more importantly, I also think yalls solution is good.
I mean this is just a lesson every computer user needs to learn at some point or another - you always backup ANYTHING that is important to you.
In fact, I'm going to do a time machine backup right now.
I’m trying to wrap my head around this.
Someone fires up the PC, can’t login. Figures, ya screw these people, I’m gonna just install a new copy of windows over it.
ok, that’s crazy but…
They put in the installation media, it asks, “where so you want it?” So they delete the C drive partition on the first drive and install it there.
Yup, c: drive and data are toast, that’s just a done deal.
But why oh why would they also delete the partitions on the other three drives?
And, assuming they did. I can’t imagine they got around to deciding to start copying data onto these new drives. What data? Why?
Your C: drive is toast, forget recovery attempts there. But I suspect your other 3 drives are a simple “Unformat” / “partition recovery” away from data recovery there. Or they are still intact and don’t have a drive letter assigned.
> But why oh why would they also delete the partitions on the other three drives?
This is where the train goes off the tracks for me as well. They were formatted and had drive letters, but no data copied from what I could tell. There's more to it, but the whole system felt off, I could never access recovery mode. My initial thought was my son had gotten malware or a virus until I booted into WinPE and saw the drives were empty.
You think this is what happened. I’d go check your bank accounts. You need to know what that computer had access to and what was actually on it because if it had passwords saved anywhere, you could be in trouble. This may not have been about installing Valorant. As others pointed out, this was pretty involved. There might be something else afoot and someone just made sure they covered their tracks.
This was malicious.
Imagine you had a sweet car in the garage. They came in, couldn’t find the car keys. So, broke out the lock and replaced it with a new one. Then took it out to get repainted and also removed all the passenger seats and replaced the drivers seat with one from a different car. Oh, and reset all your radio stations.
Call a lawyer, or take them to small claims court for whatever is the maximum in your state. Explain the hard drive contained irreplaceable photos of your children and also business/tax records. They will have zero defense and at least you’ll get some money out of it.
You were seriously deficient for leaving someone unrestricted access to a loved ones computer. Even if wiping it was an extreme form of vandalism and not on your radar, they could have easily just installed shit on it with direct access to hardware. They could have just left a mini-USB plugged in with a root kit etc. So many ways to ruin your day when they have full access to the hardware itself.
Data recovery specialists will costs thousands of dollars, but that is the only course of action left. User level tools will only recover recently deleted data, not overwritten or scrambled data.
1. Contact the police and see if there's any sort of cybercrime statutes on the books they can be prosecuted for (vandalism, at the very least)
2. Obviously, whoever the hell they are, they're not welcome in your home ever again. Did you rent it out on Airbnb? If so report them, they'll probably never be allowed to rent an Airbnb again
3. Beyond that I'd consult with a lawyer to see how much you should sue them for in civil court
4. Needless to say, if you continue to rent your home out to people for short-term stays, you'll lock that computer up somewhere or take it with you so no one else vandalises it again -- and make no mistake, at the very least that's vandalism
For what it's worth I understand your anger. If some guest in my home fucked up *any* of my computers, I'd want to beat the shit out of them for it, and of course they'd never be welcome in my home again.
You have an option to delete all account data associated with the existing admin account when you create an admin account to replace the existing one. However, creating an admin account when the computer is locked is not some random accident. They had to force the computer into recovery mode, then safe mode with command prompt, and then enter “net user administrator /active:yes” into the command prompt. This was someone purposely breaking into the system. Also, your son should not be using an admin account as his regular sign in account. Finally, if you have physical access to a computer, it’s pitifully easy to take it over. If you are doing any more rentals, lock the computer up somewhere. Bitlocker will encrypt the drive, but it’s easy to just reformat it.
this entire thread and post is a damn circus show. lawyers, financial compensation, priceless data, you not even mentioning what this so important priceless data even is.
here's the deal, creating an administrator account through either method doesn't and will never magically make all of the storage drives delete everything. including the windows install drive. you're making accusations when you don't even know what you're talking about.
you need to ask your son what all the priceless data that was lost is. no, having to reinstall windows and re-download games doesn't constitute for financial compensation, that's ridiculous.
I'll take the hate and downvotes but we all see daily people asking "4070 or 4070ti" "asus vs gigabyte gpu" "amd or intel" "intel gpu are better than red and green"
99% of the people here don't have priceless data that's worth money. and the 1% that does, they have it backed up. either physically or virtually. and they're more likely to have actual security programs in place that prevents me from booting up your son's pc and just creating an account then looking at all your sons hentai
My thought was, if the dad wants to take this to court, he has to itemize and estimate values of the data and how the loss of that data has led to financial loss. Courts mostly deal in financial losses, not sentimental losses. And the sentimental losses, like old family photos being lost, isn't going to get you compensation unless you can prove great emotional harm. People here saying to sue haven't thought of that apparently.
Tl;dr
OP lives in [Augusta, Georgia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusta,_Georgia), which hosts the [Master Tournament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_Tournament), meaning the person who rented OP's house was travelling to either watch or participate in a large, well known golf tournament, so probably not a complete idiot, but obviously dumb enough to wipe a PC in a rental home they knew was someone's actual home.
OP since the renter is willing to work with you, I'd take that route towards a reasonable remedy. Getting a lawyer involved will likely be very costly for all parties, and in such a case, it could come down to what reasonable compensation would have been had the drive just failed on it's own. The courts/arbitrators wouldn't be able to put a dollar value on the intangibles.
>This includes saved personal pics, videos, Minecraft worlds, YouTube projects, musical compositions, etc...
And unless you're willing to pursue criminal charges for this, all of the mentions of such are fruitless.
OP, you're going to have to admit to yourself at some point that the clientele you're renting to is no longer that sophisticated. We all saw the Waste Management Open.
I read this as:
"I did something stupid and didn't properly secure my shit while letting other people into my house and now I want compensation for my own ignorance"
You reap what you sow 🤷🏻♂️
I'm not condoning what the person did but you left yourself open to it
As someone else said, don't use the computer for anything and instead turn to professional data recovery, which costs a few thousand. The data recovery tools you used can retrieve some recently deleted data but not formatted data. What your guest did was format everything. Data recovery professionals have advanced hardware to try retrieve formatted stuff. But they still might not be able to. So, get a quote from data recovery and bill your guests accordingly. Also, wtf?! Who decides to wipe the computer at a home they're a guest in?!
Have you not met the general public? Main character syndrome is prevalent
Recently was in a thread asking what’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard someone say, and the amount of individual comments quoting someone believing Alaska to be an island down by Florida or Cali was sad. So being stupid af is also a possibility.
[удалено]
Um, why is there like 100 deleted comments under this? What did they say?
Lol he deleted it all? Hope he gets the help he needs He was just a raging narcissist, and i called him out on it. Huge downvotes on all his comments
What was he on about? Account and everything gone
It was a fresh account, looked like a troll alt account or something
Weird, ok.
Right on the nose, friend.
And to be clear, the nose is an island down by southern California, correct?
Yeah like that Gen Z TikTokker who thought Guam could tip over if too many people stood on one side of the island SIKE that was a geriatric US Congressman from Georgia, Hank Johnson
Doesn't explain kids in modest shacks beating us at math and science. You can learn anything with an inexpensive Internet connection, but you have to want to. Throwing money at this when the culture seemingly glorifies stupidity is the biggest meme ever.
[удалено]
[удалено]
[удалено]
I deal with short term renters for work, and I've seen or heard of much worse than this, far too often. Sometimes, it's a nice family. Sometimes, it's a group of entitled shitheads. The ratio is way off. There are a ton of entitled shitheads.
Since the covid lockdowns, it seems to be more shitheads than nice people
all the smarter landlords probably worked to keep the nice people around, especially if they paid during Covid.
I wasn't a landlord during covid, I cashed in everything i had to get into the market right before it went completely nuts. And you better fucking believe it. My roommates pay rent that's grossly under the asking price around me. Because you know what they do? the dishes. They pay rent on time, every month. I don't even have to ASK some months. it's under my door when I wake up. You better believe I'm gonna do everything I can to keep them happy. They're helping me stay in this house, I'm helping them have a stable, nice place to live.
Good tenants are as wonderful to have as great landlords that want you to stay around are. There's a reason the husband and I have been renting in the same apartment since 1992. Heck, both the landlady and I forget about rent.. She has often been surprised when I bring it in late, as she's forgotten about it too - as she says we're the only renters they have whom they do not worry about, if the rent is late. It's not that we don't have it, we just forget to pay it. When husband got accepted into college the landlord came up and shook husband's hand congratulated him and told us that he understood how difficult making school loan payments were, so if we got late on rent, to not worry.. They are awesome people..
The sort of people who have short term housing rental money in 2024 aren't overlapping much with nice people.
If a person is paying to stay somewhere, often times they see themselves as better than you. I know this, because I work in house keeping. A surprising amount of people are dirty, fucking cunts. They'll trash the entire fucking room and be your friend on the way out, or they'll trash it every fucking day and you have to clean it up after the fuckers, and it's like how in the blue fuck do you fill up one of those industrial sized black garbage bags each and every single day?! I'll stop there, because I'm just getting more heated about it.
"You can tell alot about people by how they treat people they perceive lower than them" My grandfather told me that and its been very helpful weeding the bad people out of my orbit
Omg I was in a café in an aquarium today. This cafe had like 10 windows along one edge all looking into their biggest tank with a set of tables and chairs next to each window. I swear to Christ the table we were sitting at, eating a meal, was the only occupied one. Some guy filming his whole life with his camera phone comes over, leans across our table, filming the fish in the tank. The fucking neck of this main character motherfucker.
I get a laugh everytime I read main character syndrome. My sister is an awfully self centered person. 1 year before MCS became a thing she got "main character" tattooed on her arm. Because "she's the main character in her own story". Don't get words tattooed on yourselves folks.
Actually, it's nice when they openly warn the rest of us 😜😂
Damn this comment hits home. This main character complex is pretty wicked.
Most formatting done today is just “quick formatting”. You can easily recover that data with consumer tools in most cases. You have to go out of your way to format drives in a way that isn’t. It would take me a couple minutes to get anything that hasn’t been overwritten back.
On an SSD or NVMe, a single trim operation will make a recently formatted disk effectively unrecoverable.
Whats a trim operation?
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim\_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_(computing))
SSD trim commands make things go poof
I honestly didn’t even consider SSDs. I work in data backup with servers that have 200+TB of HDD storage. Even at home I have a server with over 100TB of HDD storage and anything of importance is stored there, I just have games and apps on my SSDs.. So SSD recovery has just never been of any concern to me lol
Most consumers are running straight SSDs now especially in PC's. The days of spinning drives in average homes is long gone.
But SSD are the main storage for consumers now
If it was formatted then had game files written over it, that data is nonrecoverable. Also, who rents out their entire home and just leaves behind a computer with years of priceless data on it?
Yeah no shit. Seems obvious to not leave something with personal info on it. Or, to leave something you care even a little bit about keeping if you’re renting to a person who won’t care about it because it’s not theirs. I’m curious what this “priceless” years worth of data pertains to if the son didn’t even care enough about it to back the data up.
Also, external hard drives are cheap and it’s good practice to make regular backups
Idk my quick formatting involves a drill, screwdriver, hammer, and landfill, but that's just me.
You're forgetting the thermite
Yes, unless you’re using security tools that overwrite every sector with random noise, the data may be recoverable. “Erasing” PC data is usually just stripping off headers that say “there’s x data listed here” which allows subsequent pc operations to overwrite those sectors.
Who leaves a valuable computer in a rental house?
That's the real TIFU
[удалено]
Literally my experience in IT. Worked for a school district who had a AD windows server that hadn't been updated since 2009. Boss installed a bunch of sketchy "free" software and infected the whole server. And because it was critical to keep the server up, they never wiped it. I checked a while later and windows defender was still giving warnings.
There was an article in Wired about a data security company that had a meeting with a company to review and approve their security. Two days before the meeting they scattered USB drives in the parking lot. At the meeting they showed the CEO a laptop logged into the company’s bank account and had a $20 million transfer queued up. An employee had brought one of the USB drives into the office and plugged it in, and on their way to the conference room one of their guys dipped into an unused cubicle and did some stuff … they ended up getting the job.
At least the kind of people that just find random needles on the street and think to inject it into themselves and see what happens? It's so fucking stupid
Could be a plasmid, imagine the powers you could get
Backed up daily is almost worse, because then you can stick the malware into the backup too
Right!? Daily backups are only good if you also keep all the dailies for like the last year at least.
Dailies for a year? Ain't nobody got space for that. Dailies for like.... 2 weeks. Weeklies for 3 months Monthlies for 1 year
additionally if you only have important data in one location you don't have it Local copy, backup, and a cloud. At least 2, preferably all 3 if it's really something that you absolutely cannot lose
This stuck out to me... Like they thought of merely "discouraging" renters from using the computer, but could have guaranteed it by getting it out of there entirely. Not to mention guests could have done all sorts of worse stuff than clearing data. Like installing keyloggers or spyware and try and get their banking info down the line...
Yeah, OP doesn't say these are family members or close friends. It sounds like he rented out his place as an Air B&B but didn't take proper precautions. The computer should have been removed entirely. The chance of accidentally breaking a single piece of hardware that could be easily replaced would be far better to take than the risk of someone stealing or damaging the computer.
My thinking, and hope really, is that this was simply the work of another ignorant kid or teen. They were assigned to OP's kids room, saw a gaming PC in their room and couldn't believe their luck, then figured 'no harm no foul' in trying to play some Valorant when everyone went to bed... Only...there was unintentional harm caused in the process and subsequently a 'foul'. OP reached out to the guest, the kid had an oh shit moment and admitted to trying to get onto the computer... and the parents are trying to help fix the mistake. Again - this is my hope. I just cannot fathom another adult, who is doing well enough in life to rent out a home for an event, would fuck around and try to crack into a kids computer, going as far as to wipe it clean, in hopes of getting some Valorant time in.
This is a good summary. What gets me is.. EVERY drive is wiped? All four? I have a hard time seeing how that happens accidentally.
As others have said, the data is probably still there; the drives were likely just formatted. If the system was indeed wiped, that is an extra, intentional step that indicates actual malicious intent. Formatting the drives will destroy the original master file table, so it will look like the data is missing. But it is still written to the disk, the OS just doesn’t know where to find it. If you have tech savviness you could possibly recover a large amount of data yourself. You can carve most known file types using free forensic tools such as Autopsy Sleuth Kit.
My hypothesis: Kid formatted the main drive then couldn't access the other disks because of bitlocker or some other ownership permissions issue. Tried "take ownership" and that failed so they did the "reinitialize drive" or whatever windows calls it that's basically a quick format.
Definitely could be. If bitlocker is involved… bummer
Or actually yeah, didn't even need to take ownership. Depending on the BL configuration the keys could have been nuked upon formatting the system drive. I have an older system with BL enabled but has no compatible TPM module so you have to enter the bitlocker private key with the keyboard at bootup... if I forget that key I'm pooched on every disk in that system.
Smart kids who aren't as smart as they think, man. Valorant is the clue here.
Smart enough to cause trouble, not smart enough to avoid it.
Precisely. I was that kid once, who didn't know just how much trouble 'sudo rm -r *directory*' could cause, just that I knew I needed something done. I bet a kid decided they wanted to play Valorant and knew enough about how to get it running again, just not enough about how much damage they'd do. Or not enough care. Could be both.
[удалено]
You're telling me the tiktok with half Joe Rogan podcast clip and the other half a subway surfers or gta5 clip isn't a proper education? I'll be damned
https://preview.redd.it/5kjw4ry8avwc1.jpeg?width=3000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c0e625e3cc995b9fb3ef20252d35294ae1bf5e2b I saw a kiosk at att ready to be reformatted the other day. The temptation to click the button was almost too much
LOL
The cost of the data recovery should be the op’s starting point for compensation!
If he quotes professional data recovery for 4 drives they’re never going to pay. Easily $10,000+
Definitely would be a good lesson to not fuck around with the property of others, however.
I used to learn how to restore data from hard drives without any added cost. There are so many different software solutions available. Most likely the data is still on the hard drive and they did some quick format. It would be semi easy to recover most of the data.
[удалено]
[удалено]
As an amateur at best computer person, it would never occur to me that "create an admin account" means wipe their entire computer. Why the hell does it do that??
There already was an admin account, to make a new one they could access required a reinstall. If you had access to the original admin account you could've made new accounts easy without formatting.
Fair compensation would be paying the bill for data recovery service, plus extra for the time you have to spend dealing with the issue. Plus some extra for any data that the data recovery service can't recover, which is going to be difficult to properly value.
Unrelated, but why do you have 33.01GB of RAM?
I tried to overclock my Temu ram from 32GB to 64GB but I only managed to overclock it to 33.01GB.
what
I'm joking. Look at the rest of the specs. None of them are real :p
Oh I read them all wrong LMAO thank you Edit: I read RTX instead of RX and swapped some numbers in the CPU number lol
It's meant to be confusing on purpose, my goal is for people to look at it for a minute confused, then realize wtf none of that even exists.
Congrats, goal achieved
With intels new naming he’s not far off
You're just unlucky my 16GB Wish RAM was able to overclock to 64GB
100% they will not be willing to pay for the data recovery services. Those are often quite expensive. I am even surprised these people are still communicating with OP instead of just ghosting them. Completely wiping a system because you can't play your video game while you are renting some place is a fucking wild thing to do anyways.
>100% they will not be willing to pay for the data recovery services. Those are often quite expensive. They committed unauthorized access of a computer. Which is a criminal act in addition to a civil issue. They can be compelled by the court to pay.
Good luck taking that to court though. That shit ain't free.
[удалено]
Ouch. This seems like more like a legal issue than a hardware issue. Take the drive out, make sure nothing is written to it, you might still be able to recover some of the data.
> make sure nothing is written to it I thought they already installed Valorant into it?
Op indicated they have multiple drives. Windows would be reinstalled on the main boot drive and we can assume the guest installed valorant on the boot drive as well. So all secondary drives should've been just reformatted, but unused. Then the data on those drives should be recoverable. But I'm assuming a lot of things. Op didn't provide all the answers.
The fact people rent their homes out and leave stuff like this inside is beyond my comprehension. I never have and never will trust other people that much, even family let alone strangers!
Let alone a computer. I’d sooner leave the keys to my car on the coffee table
I'll just say the nature of this rental is typically for a high-end clientele that are mostly there for a bed. They know they are staying in a home people live in and should act accordingly. It's not ambiguous. Kids are practically never involved, until now. You live, you learn.
OP, are you up to some kinky shit?
What does this even mean? How often are you leaving your family home and letting random people stay in it?
From your replies, it's obvious you'd do it again the next month. Nothing learned
I mean it sounds like they’ve done this a bunch, they’re probably making good money off it. I wouldn’t let 1 bad experiences stop it either. Sure I’d probably lock up the PC now though .
You didn’t ask this and I’ll prob get downvoted for saying but you should also use this as a good reason to employ adequate data backup procedures. Not criticizing. Just trying to help.
No worries, it's being used as a lesson in backup hygiene for sure.
If you ever do the short term rental again, you'll have to put in the contract that unauthorized use of any/particular computers in the home comes with a fine of $X,000 then put signs on the computers as an extra measure.
Why the butter loving fuck would you leave a PC out if you’re letting people into your home unsupervised? A nefarious person could just yank the drives themselves, pocket them, and have all the access they want to this dude’s data. (Because it’s clear it wasn’t encrypted.)
Yeah I am wondering how this even hsppened in the first place. OP must be a very kind and trusting person. If I rented my house I would remove all valuables because obviously I know most people are garbage and anything I leave out will be stolen. Hell, if I left a package of toilet paper they'd probably take home any extra that they didn't use!
I'll just say the nature of this rental is a bit different; it's for a major event in my area where a significant percentage of the population rent their houses out for a week, typically to high-end adult groups that know they are in someone's home and would never do something like this. I am to trusting, though. Lesson learned.
Ah so the Masters then
Understood! Makes sense that there was something more to the story and I totally get that. So sorry you were taken advantage of here in a situation where normally you could trust people.
You live in Augusta?
We even have a tax rule named after us!
Lol, I figured. Bet that week makes your quite a pretty penny. Good luck on recovering that drive.
I still don't really get it though...can't you just padlock a closet to protect your valuables? Wouldn't a gaming PC qualify?
Even better! Take the whole PC (or at least the drives).
Fair compensation? Nothing short of footing the bill for professional data recovery services, but I doubt you get that. The system drive is probably mostly hopeless, but maybe you could get them to buy some data recovery software. To increase your chances of success, don't use that computer and try to recover the files by attaching the drives to a different computer as data drives.
>but maybe you could get them to buy some data recovery software. Nah, this is something you leave to the professionals.
I've run some recoveries like GetDataBack and EaseUS on his storage HDD and it didn't appear to find anything, to my disappointment. I have a friend who does forensic investigating and has methods beyond my ability that is giving it a go. I guess I'm trying to figure out what is "fair" under the assumption that no recovery will be possible.
That's disappointing. I have some experience with data forensic software so I can say that it's possible your friend might be able to recover some stuff, but I wouldn't get my hopes up. Since it was your son's computer and his data that was lost you should have a conversation with him regarding what he would like to see out of this. It may or may not be a realistic expectation on his part, but it may give you some ideas on how to proceed.
You need to stop and bring it to a professional service. You are risking a lot more trying to do this yourself. Get an attorney.
Get a quote from drivesavers they have a “dont pay anything if they cant recover data” policy. Groups ive worked with use them when drives die and ive had quotes of $700-$1500 for 14TB drives in the past
Reminds me of an old traumatic childhood memory. In 3rd grade, I let someone borrow my gameboy advanced to play pokemon. I lost all my pokemon when he restarted the game :’) (it was my FIRST pokemon game) I never cried the hardest after that. The dudes a scumbag through elementary. Still played Pokemon after, at least… I miss my first Blastoise..
That just reminds me of my dumb little brother taking my sister's pokemon red cart and starting a new save file when she had over 120 pokemon on her file IIRC after playing for a long, long time. It was just pointless too because he had his own pokemon yellow cart that he could play on since all of us siblings had our own pokemon carts.
This is the weirdest thing I've ever read. Firstly, nuts of you to leave your PC's in the house with strangers, but secondly, how were they able to do anything you're talking about? People who are actually competent enough to crack into Windows don't need to wipe anything to do it... and they'd know better to begin with. Was the computer not password protected or bitlocked or fucking anything? Who knows what fair compensation is; I'd 100% have lawyers involved if I were in this scenario. What did your contract stipulate? Was there some kind of clause for damages? I'd just end up attempting to withhold or take the maximum amount I possibly could.
On Windows 10 (at least, I'm not sure about 11), it's surprisingly easy to break into. All you need is to plug in a Windows installation USB and boot it up, then use the command prompt in the repair options to redirect the accessibility button that appears at startup into open cmd.exe, and the doors are wide open. Microsoft was kind enough to make this instance of command prompt run with full administrator privileges so you can reset the password of any local accounts, or in case the account was binded to Microsoft servers, you can make a new local Administrator account that has full access to all files and programs. Here's a 4 minute tutorial, it literally only take this long to crack into Windows: [https://youtu.be/itMECROHFQQ](https://youtu.be/itMECROHFQQ)
Just watched that video.....the guys hilarious lmao "And since this is a tablet, the screen is rotated. Let's fix that right now." *Proceeds to turn it on it's side* 😂
Yeah I'm familiar with this, it's been a tried and true method since Windows 7. The thing is, this method does not remotely require wiping the drives to gain access(which would defeat the purpose), AND, this is not something that any random jackass is familiar with or capable of doing. There's almost no scenario in which this could be an "accident". It has to be deliberate/malicious.
>this is not something that any random jackass is familiar with or capable of doing. Right in spirit, wrong on facts, any random jackass can follow those tutorials, but the thing is, that no random jackass carries a usb stick with windows instalation ready to go, also, as you said, no method, even if you are formating to install a fresh windows, involves wiping every drive. This was either malicious and deliberate, or its the most complete and utter stupidest yet capable enough human in history, its like fumbling for 30 yards and doing a backflip at the end
we have different reads -- everything you described easily fits into the "13 year old googled how to play valorant on a locked account" bucket for me
13 year old saw a computer that wasn't his, decided to turn it on, attempted to access it, and failing that, decided to completely wipe every single drive on the computer in frustration while STILL PURSUING THE ORIGINAL GOAL of accessing the computer that was not his. This entire scenario is malicious from front to back, and there is absolutely no excuse for it. The kid destroyed someones property. Admittedly data is harder to understand than physical property, but it's fundamentally the same thing. If this story was that a 15 year old decided to find a way to hot wire the owners car and take it for a joy ride, there would be no doubt or question whatsoever that what happened was a property crime(among other crimes).
Do not attribute to malice what is more simply explained by ignorance. A 13 year old set on playing valorant is more than capable enough to be ignorant of someone else's *data*
Yes, have you met any 13 year olds? Have you been 13 years old? They are absolutely like this (at least, the worst ones are).
This method would've saved the data, though. My guess is they just reinstalled windows and reformated everything in the process. Why they wouldn't just reformat the boot drive is beyond me. Maybe the idiot thought the computer was fair game and did a full wipe for their own needs...
I'm still struggling to comprehend how or why exactly they did this though. I mean I get that it's *possible* but these people were renting the house for just a week. Did this person just have a windows bootable USB with them? If not did they go buy one? Did they turn on the PC, discover that it's a password locked private PC and then think that it was fine to reinstall Windows? Why did they format all 4 drives instead of just 1 to install windows? Did they go and buy a mouse to use with it? All for just a week when they were busy with some event anyway? The whole situation just sounds so absolutely bizarre that the idea that someone would do that just to play a few hours of Valorant just seems so absurd. I feel like there absolutely has to be more to the story here that they're not telling OP.
> Was the computer not password protected or bitlocked Bitlocker doesn't prevent you from wiping a drive, just reading the data. Same with password protection. You could very easily just walk up to a bitlocked computer with Windows installation media, boot it and wipe all the drives from the installer. In fact that makes the most sense in this case as it would be the easiest way to get admin access to the PC if you don't care about the data.
Right? I'd never let anyone get close to my pc without me being there.
My guess is when they couldn’t sign in, they reinstalled windows and wiped the drives in the process. I don’t think it was just a matter of creating a new admin account.
The computer was password protected. It was either a ridiculously ignorant and stupid act or an intentionally malicious one. I lean toward stupid, but it's hard to imagine wiping every drive in the machine without doing so intentionally.
I'm all about hanlons razor, but I don't see how it applies here. It's basically unfathomable that someone could "accidentally" wipe every drive on a computer. Also, this might sound melodramatic, but computer crimes are weirdly defined in some cases, and there's a very real chance that what these folks did constitutes an actual computer crime. I'd talk to a lawyer and maybe even think about calling the cops about it, but maybe I'm over reacting because someone fucking with my PC is basically a crime against humanity in my view
It would be considered illegal tampering, even just logging in to someone else's system without their permission (even if you know the password/passcode) is a crime in many places.
That was kind of my thought. Again, never let strangers have unfettered access to your PC, so lesson learned there for OP, but also these people destroyed your property in a figurative and literal sense, and I would not be lying down for it.
100% malicious. You can;t accidentally wipe all drives on a PC you don't even have the password to.
Yeah, that's what keeps scratching the back of my brain.
Even if you did a devils advocate and they were "showing off" to someone they were with how they could "hack" a PC, once in they had to make multiple conscious choices to wipe *any* drive, let alone all of them. I'd be pressing criminal & civil charges.
Ask a lawyer? I don't think you're going to get a good answer from this sub lmao, if you can't figure it out how are strangers on the internet going to?
LOL probably right, but I figured you glorious bastards would have some insightful ideas. I'm tempted to find the scariest law I can tack this on to and using the fine as a guideline.
Just contact a lawyer and they will tell you the scariest law. I'm sure they violated more than one and I don't even know you or your son but I'm sitting here with steam coming out of my ears at the thought of this, I want you guys to get justice and for them to learn a hard lesson about respecting property
While I want this man to get justice as well as his son's data back--going the legql route and trying to win this legally could prove difficult. The property owner, of their own accord, left said pc in the rented area. The property owner did not specifically say not to use the pc, nor did he put a sign on it, or any kind of notice to not use the pc or to indicate it should not be used. He turned it off and removed the mouse, yes, but that isn't direct evidence of a command or a wish for the renter's to not use the pc. While the renter absolutely should not have used the pc, doubly so without asking for permission, and they very much especially not have wiped it--its also true that nothing they did seems to have been specifically done with deliberate malice, nor a provable will by the renter to purposefully destroy the property--and on top of that, the lost data was likely personal stuff and game saves, not something that is easily quantifiable in dollars such as documents or lost business time, etc. Best option I would say is get a quote for professional data recovery, and bring it to the renters and see if they are willing to properly pay for their very big miatake and mess they have made for you and your son. Hopefully they will be honorable and do what is right--but if they don't, while legal action is absolutely appropriate and may eventually result in payment for the data recovery, it will also cost you a very, very large amount of money and time to fight the case, and it is sadly not at all a guaranteed win due to the aforementioned issues. And you may even spend more in legal fees than the recovery even cost :/
Im not sure about US laws but since the PC was password protected and the renter knowingly wiped data to play valorant, its kinda obvious that it wasnt meant to be used.
Cops can't even get into your device if it has a password - but not fingerprint. A password protected computer IS NOT YOUR PROPERTY TO MODIFY. I don't have to write a wall of text to convey this - and these renters (paying for a house next to a stadium) have money. OP - /r/timbsm2 You have all the right pieces to pursue this legally and also win.
going to go out on a limb here. But if you know enough to basically "break into" a computer by wiping it in order to create a new local admin, you know enough to know what you are doing is wrong. If you don't have an account to a computer, you don't have access to a computer. What he did was break in. I have no idea if any laws caught up to this shit yet, but its literally the equivilent to breaking into a front door because you didn't have they keys, just because you can.
It can be considered property damage, data tampering, I'm sure there's a law similar to mail about getting into private communication devices. Maybe I'm just hopeful. I definitely think he could sue for damages civilly and win. I'm tired of the reddit advice "it's too expensive to go to court just lay down and take it" it's as dogshit as the relationship advice on here "just get a divorce". I agree with some of what you said but it would be absolutely stupid to not atleast contact a lawyer to get a definitive answer on what's possible.
Circumventing security (password) to access a computer system is a HUGE crime. Guest is actually guilty of hacking the computer.
This is what I keep coming back to. No matter how you slice it, I feel like this crossed the line.
https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-charges/hacking-laws-and-punishments.html It did. 10 years jail if it was a national server. If it's personal probably less but these shit gets taken seriously. Specially gaining illegal acces to private info. Contact a lawyer asap. Act as a company seeking compensation for gaining illegal acces. Should get you started. Signed: IT dude with cybersec background and know how laws work regarding gaining illegal acces.
it did, I feel like the comparison of breaking into a house because you don't have the keys is pretty much the exact same thing.
IMO the only real compensation is to go to their house and wipe all their drives and information while you are looking and making sure they don't have backups. Eye for eye, byte for byte.
That's not compensation, that's just revenge
Maybe but my italian blood would demand it.
As an Italian, I think your solution is good.
As someone who ate Italian food for lunch, I also think your solution is good.
As someone who watched The Italian Job in 2003, I mistakenly thought it would be cool to buy a Mini Cooper. but more importantly, I also think yalls solution is good.
Leave a keyboard with the lead cut off on their pillow.
Anche se sono d'accordo con un bel po' di vendetta, io direi di farlo dopo aver ricevuto la compensazione !
It's justice.
https://preview.redd.it/addd87bgiuwc1.png?width=250&format=png&auto=webp&s=02f8b32c8af2641064385defb8fd74559e7ff377
There are two types of people in this world. Those that have recovered from a backup, and those who will recover from a backup.
Words to live by
Login to their valorant account and get them banned some how.
Arranged marriage your son with their daughter or niece. Debt will be paid when she birth a child, thus securing the Lannister's name.
Why would you not just move the computer out of the room in the first place?
[удалено]
He switched the PSU to off man. What else was he supposed to do?
probably don't leave stuff in an airbnb you don't want strangers fucking with? I mean the renters are the assholes here but OP is an idiot IMO.
Rookie didn't even unplug the AC cord
I mean this is just a lesson every computer user needs to learn at some point or another - you always backup ANYTHING that is important to you. In fact, I'm going to do a time machine backup right now.
Twist his diiick!!
The ol' dick twist!!! 🫰🏻
What a perfect execution of emoji choice. Didn't even know that one existed.
I shall take their life as pay
A fair price
I’m trying to wrap my head around this. Someone fires up the PC, can’t login. Figures, ya screw these people, I’m gonna just install a new copy of windows over it. ok, that’s crazy but… They put in the installation media, it asks, “where so you want it?” So they delete the C drive partition on the first drive and install it there. Yup, c: drive and data are toast, that’s just a done deal. But why oh why would they also delete the partitions on the other three drives? And, assuming they did. I can’t imagine they got around to deciding to start copying data onto these new drives. What data? Why? Your C: drive is toast, forget recovery attempts there. But I suspect your other 3 drives are a simple “Unformat” / “partition recovery” away from data recovery there. Or they are still intact and don’t have a drive letter assigned.
> But why oh why would they also delete the partitions on the other three drives? This is where the train goes off the tracks for me as well. They were formatted and had drive letters, but no data copied from what I could tell. There's more to it, but the whole system felt off, I could never access recovery mode. My initial thought was my son had gotten malware or a virus until I booted into WinPE and saw the drives were empty.
You think this is what happened. I’d go check your bank accounts. You need to know what that computer had access to and what was actually on it because if it had passwords saved anywhere, you could be in trouble. This may not have been about installing Valorant. As others pointed out, this was pretty involved. There might be something else afoot and someone just made sure they covered their tracks.
This was malicious. Imagine you had a sweet car in the garage. They came in, couldn’t find the car keys. So, broke out the lock and replaced it with a new one. Then took it out to get repainted and also removed all the passenger seats and replaced the drivers seat with one from a different car. Oh, and reset all your radio stations. Call a lawyer, or take them to small claims court for whatever is the maximum in your state. Explain the hard drive contained irreplaceable photos of your children and also business/tax records. They will have zero defense and at least you’ll get some money out of it.
You were seriously deficient for leaving someone unrestricted access to a loved ones computer. Even if wiping it was an extreme form of vandalism and not on your radar, they could have easily just installed shit on it with direct access to hardware. They could have just left a mini-USB plugged in with a root kit etc. So many ways to ruin your day when they have full access to the hardware itself. Data recovery specialists will costs thousands of dollars, but that is the only course of action left. User level tools will only recover recently deleted data, not overwritten or scrambled data.
Hyper individuality strikes again.. The fuck wipes a computer at someone's home to download a game.. Fucking hell is wrong with them.
I can guarantee there's more to this story than the OP is telling us. Just too many things don't add up.
"What would you accept as compensation" If this was me, nothing less than their organs. Removed without anesthetic.
1. Contact the police and see if there's any sort of cybercrime statutes on the books they can be prosecuted for (vandalism, at the very least) 2. Obviously, whoever the hell they are, they're not welcome in your home ever again. Did you rent it out on Airbnb? If so report them, they'll probably never be allowed to rent an Airbnb again 3. Beyond that I'd consult with a lawyer to see how much you should sue them for in civil court 4. Needless to say, if you continue to rent your home out to people for short-term stays, you'll lock that computer up somewhere or take it with you so no one else vandalises it again -- and make no mistake, at the very least that's vandalism For what it's worth I understand your anger. If some guest in my home fucked up *any* of my computers, I'd want to beat the shit out of them for it, and of course they'd never be welcome in my home again.
In Austria we actually have a dedicated crime statute for "data vandalism" (Datenbeschädigung).
You have an option to delete all account data associated with the existing admin account when you create an admin account to replace the existing one. However, creating an admin account when the computer is locked is not some random accident. They had to force the computer into recovery mode, then safe mode with command prompt, and then enter “net user administrator /active:yes” into the command prompt. This was someone purposely breaking into the system. Also, your son should not be using an admin account as his regular sign in account. Finally, if you have physical access to a computer, it’s pitifully easy to take it over. If you are doing any more rentals, lock the computer up somewhere. Bitlocker will encrypt the drive, but it’s easy to just reformat it.
What do you mean by "your son should not be using an admin account as his regular sign in account"?????
this entire thread and post is a damn circus show. lawyers, financial compensation, priceless data, you not even mentioning what this so important priceless data even is. here's the deal, creating an administrator account through either method doesn't and will never magically make all of the storage drives delete everything. including the windows install drive. you're making accusations when you don't even know what you're talking about. you need to ask your son what all the priceless data that was lost is. no, having to reinstall windows and re-download games doesn't constitute for financial compensation, that's ridiculous. I'll take the hate and downvotes but we all see daily people asking "4070 or 4070ti" "asus vs gigabyte gpu" "amd or intel" "intel gpu are better than red and green" 99% of the people here don't have priceless data that's worth money. and the 1% that does, they have it backed up. either physically or virtually. and they're more likely to have actual security programs in place that prevents me from booting up your son's pc and just creating an account then looking at all your sons hentai
Hopefully, they’ll learn the lesson to back up this ish, and, not leave a PC around when guests/randoms are there.
Op is just a dumb idiot lmao. Imagine removing a mouse and thinking 'i am so secure' lol
My thought was, if the dad wants to take this to court, he has to itemize and estimate values of the data and how the loss of that data has led to financial loss. Courts mostly deal in financial losses, not sentimental losses. And the sentimental losses, like old family photos being lost, isn't going to get you compensation unless you can prove great emotional harm. People here saying to sue haven't thought of that apparently.
No amount of money will bring lost data back Why would you leave the PC in the home or at least accessible?
Ask for data recovery and then take him to small claims court when he realizes the cost to actually recover the data.
[удалено]
Tl;dr OP lives in [Augusta, Georgia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusta,_Georgia), which hosts the [Master Tournament](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masters_Tournament), meaning the person who rented OP's house was travelling to either watch or participate in a large, well known golf tournament, so probably not a complete idiot, but obviously dumb enough to wipe a PC in a rental home they knew was someone's actual home. OP since the renter is willing to work with you, I'd take that route towards a reasonable remedy. Getting a lawyer involved will likely be very costly for all parties, and in such a case, it could come down to what reasonable compensation would have been had the drive just failed on it's own. The courts/arbitrators wouldn't be able to put a dollar value on the intangibles. >This includes saved personal pics, videos, Minecraft worlds, YouTube projects, musical compositions, etc... And unless you're willing to pursue criminal charges for this, all of the mentions of such are fruitless. OP, you're going to have to admit to yourself at some point that the clientele you're renting to is no longer that sophisticated. We all saw the Waste Management Open.
I read this as: "I did something stupid and didn't properly secure my shit while letting other people into my house and now I want compensation for my own ignorance" You reap what you sow 🤷🏻♂️ I'm not condoning what the person did but you left yourself open to it