> Remove all personal data from your computer before taking it in for repair. Ha! Great advice, unless your broken computer is broken. When you take your mac

> Remove all personal data from your computer before taking it in for repair. Ha! Great advice, unless your broken computer is broken. When you take your machine in for service they're going to want an admin account name and password to a working system, so here's my advice: - Use FileVault encryption on your main system partition. - Create a small-ish unencrypted partition and install a bootable version of OS X. This is a great way to play around with pre-release versions of the OS. - Create a dummy admin account and give it a password that you don't use for anything else. Write the account name and password down somewhere. - If/when you need to take your machine in for service, tell them to boot into that unencrypted partition and use your dummy admin account. A little while ago my 2011 iMac's video card failed; apparently a common problem with that model year. The machine wouldn't boot, but thanks to Thunderbolt Target Disk Mode I was able to make a copy of my home folder with my laptop. When I took my machine in they asked for an admin account. I already had that unencrypted small partition for them to use, but I hadn't set up a separate admin account and had to give them my primary username and password, which is something I really didn't want to do. They would have potentially had access to my encrypted partition along with my Keychain. I ended up having to change a whole bunch of account passwords, just to be safe. So I think it's very good advice to create a separate admin account with a password that you're comfortable giving out, along with an unencrypted system partition that you're comfortable losing. (By the way, Apple fixed that iMac for free even though it was over 4 years old, way out of warranty, and was supposedly not included in a video card replacement plan they issued for other iMac models of that year. Target disk mode saved the day, and Apple fixed my old computer for free, so I'm a very happy camper and am still using that machine.)