Question What do you do with 2nd/3rd drives when sending in for repair?

MikeyLV

Distinguished
Sep 14, 2015
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18,510
I have a gaming laptop that will be going back to XOTICPC for repair. I've purchased many from them and this repair is my fault. They will be replacing the keyboard, trackpad left button (or entire assembly), and replacing the thermal compound for the CPU & GPU (it's been a few years).

The laptop has three drives: C for Windows and some programs, D for most programs and files, Z stores a copy of every program that is installed in case of major failure (although I image backup 2x/week on all drives).

Should they need to make sure things work, which I would hope with a keyboard and trackpad button, I have created a user account for them that is not password protected. Mine is. The issue is that they could, from their account, see everything on all drives (as simple as just getting to This PC).

My question is, what do you do with your non-system drives? I'm only concerned about D. I can use Bitlocker, but with 2TB of data on a 4TB SSD, the encrypt then decrypt is shown to take ~67 hours, which is reasonable for the size and I can unlock it and then unencrypt it when I get it back. I could also just remove the D drive itself.

Wondering what you guys and gals would do.
 

USAFRet

Illustrious
Moderator
Take an Image of each drive individually, with Macrium Reflect or similar.

Save these to some other drive.

Assuming the Factory Reset partition and function still exists, do that.
Return the system back to original out of the box config.

When you get it back, recover those Images to the relevant drive(s).