(CNN) The man accused of killing four people at a Nashville-area Waffle House thought his laptop had been hacked about a month before the shooting, said the owner of the repair shop where Travis Reinking took his computer.

Reinking told technicians that his computer had been acting up and the USB port wasn't working, so the technician reformatted his hard drive -- a common troubleshooting measure -- which wiped the data from Reinking's hard drive, Dang It Repairs owner Robert Hartline told CNN.

It's common for customers to come in complaining their machine has been hacked, he said.

Reinking dropped off the device March 19 and picked it up the next day, Hartline said. At no point did Reinking ask that the computer be wiped, he said.

"He's very smart. He knows a lot about computers. He tried to do the same troubleshooting our technicians would do," Hartline said of the suspected shooter. "He knew it very well. He's no dummy."

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