Maybe he's just stupid.
Get new ones, back up from the cloud, and just fix the old ones to give away.
Then, he forgot about them. Repair shop guy probably wouldn't have looked in detail at the drives, rather just get them to boot up again. It was when Hunter never returned to pick them up that the repair guy looked through them, IIRC. Looking for contact, info, for example.
Using a laptop doesn't necessarily mean Hunter knew how they worked on an OS level.