How to secure laptop that going in for repair

mattyg · 20 Oct 2025 at 10:22

My expensive Lenovo Legion i9 has a screen fault and is being sent away for repair.
Is best practice to remove both M.2's and send in bare or leave a spare M.2 in there with a copy of windows on it.

Theres nothing nefarious on it but it is my work laptop

Zefan · 20 Oct 2025 at 10:26

I'd presume for a work machine it will have full disk encryption aka bitlocker?

mattyg · 20 Oct 2025 at 10:30

Zefan said:
I'd presume for a work machine it will have full disk encryption aka bitlocker?

Nah.

Its my laptop that I use for work... My company.

Never thought about bitlocker. Which is odd as I'm getting more and more paranoid about all the Outages with the recent hacking of everything

Would bitlocker be the easiest solution, Without slowing the laptop down

Rroff · 20 Oct 2025 at 10:39

Dunno about Lenovo but not been uncommon with some other brands to just wipe laptops and just send them out refurbished (or "refurbished") not necessarily back to the same customer who sent it in - one of the reasons I will never touch Asus these days.

mattyg · 20 Oct 2025 at 10:45

Rroff said:
Dunno about Lenovo but not been uncommon with some other brands to just wipe laptops and just send them out refurbished (or "refurbished") not necessarily back to the same customer who sent it in - one of the reasons I will never touch Asus these days.

Yeah, I've heard the same. Not sure if lenovo do, I'd be pretty miffed as it was a £4500 laptop.

I'll probably not risk it and replace the drives and leave them with a bare windows install

Darkpilgrim · 20 Oct 2025 at 10:55

I would remove the drives, better safe then sorry.

hyperseven · 20 Oct 2025 at 11:03

image drives to external and then secure wipe.

mattyg · 21 Oct 2025 at 12:28

I ended up removing the drives. I put an old M.2 in with the idea of installing a fresh windows install, but couldn't get it to boot from USB. (secure boot off)

So gave up. Boxed it up and FEDEX collected this morning.

Feels like i've lost an arm!!

So back on the desktop upstairs in the Hoffice

mattyg · Tuesday at 11:33

Cant knock the repair process. Laptop collected Tuesday and got it back yesterday (monday) only a screen replacement but still they got it wednesday and it was back in the post friday afternoon.

Quartz · Tuesday at 11:49

mattyg said:
My expensive Lenovo Legion i9 has a screen fault and is being sent away for repair.
Is best practice to remove both M.2's and send in bare or leave a spare M.2 in there with a copy of windows on it.

I'm too late to the party but you should have consulted your corporate IT department. They would have been able to properly advise you as regards the Data Protection Act etc. But a good rule of thumb is to not let commercially-sensitive data out of your control, so I think you did the right thing.

Zefan · Tuesday at 12:09

Quartz said:
I'm too late to the party but you should have consulted your corporate IT department. They would have been able to properly advise you as regards the Data Protection Act etc. But a good rule of thumb is to not let commercially-sensitive data out of your control, so I think you did the right thing.

mattyg said:
Nah.

Its my laptop that I use for work... My company.

x

mattyg · Tuesday at 12:56

Quartz said:
I'm too late to the party but you should have consulted your corporate IT department. They would have been able to properly advise you as regards the Data Protection Act etc. But a good rule of thumb is to not let commercially-sensitive data out of your control, so I think you did the right thing.

I did, and they recommended posting on OCUK forums. They said apart from the Motors and Graphics card section everyone is friendly and really helpful...