I agree, take the HDD out. It shouldn't void the warranty, it's usually 2 screws and just pulling the drive out. You could replace it with an empty hard drive, and they might format it and put a blank OS on it.

I've had some dealings with HP when my hard drive failed, or when my CPU had issues, and they wiped my Hard drive even though it wasn't the problem, quite annoying. One thing they did do is offer for $80 to burn my data to a DVD...

Curiously one of the requirements when returning the computer (to HP) for testing/repair was to give them my password, which of course would bypass the encryption some people have suggested as the key is based on your password.

Thanks all. I think in just going to clean up my browser history and passwords. Also change all my accounts password ex...bank and PayPal. I don't think I have any personal files but I double check.

As others said before me, your best course of action is to take out the HDD. No data in their hands, no risk for you. If they tell you that this will void the warranty, then just ask them take it out for you and take it home. When the repair is done, ask them to put the HDD in again.

Pulling out the HDD might void the service warranty.

Kind of a pain, but I would make a full drive image on all the partitions with free imaging software like Macrium, then after confirming your image is good, nuke the drive with DBAN as Smannesman had suggested.

Then when you get the laptop back, restore the drive image. Not 100% sure it will fully restore, but it should.

I don't think so... unless you have to disassemble the laptop to access it. Otherwise the hard drive shouldn't void the warranty, since some people have one hard drive for gaming, and one for business, and one for their folks, etc; Although quick swapping drives is a little less common now with drives being much larger than they used to be...

Ask Gary Glitter about that one...

Unless removing the HDD doesn't void the warranty, I'll go with the above ^ suggestion. The DBAN part might be a little excessive, I don't think they'd go that far, but I can't say the same about in-plain-sight files.

Techs tend to fiddle with your personal files sometimes (especially if it's a woman's system), I've seen it happen at a local shop I used to visit regularly.