Can HDD hide part of data?

Question

Hard disks

The HDD was in the laptop, but the laptop was filled with a wonderful drink and went to warm climes to warm up. Before sending the laptop on vacation, I pulled out the HDD. When I connected the HDD to another PC, I found that the windows account was not as much as it was. That is, when the HDD was in the laptop there were 5 accounts, when I inserted it into another computer there were 2 of them. The laptop had licensed windows 8.1, but could it somehow affect the pirated PC (also windows 8.1)? Why could this happen and is it possible to recover data? I know very well about recuva and data recovery software similar to it, but I don’t want to scan a 500gb HDD because it takes a very long time.

Answer 1

This may be if the accounts were stored on another drive.
It does not depend on the availability of a license, activation and other things.
Look in Users - there will be links to account profiles.

Answer 2

Write the laptop model. It seems to me that there was a non-removable SSD.