Dell visit tomorrow - question about drive replacement

[BJG]

Just spent most of the morning trying to help a Chinese student with a failed laptop...she had little English, and I have no Mandarin, so it was hard work.

 

...anyway, it sounds like the drive's failed, there's stuff on it she needs, there isn't a backup, and she's expecting an on-site visit from a Dell technician tomorrow.

 

It seems it's standard practice for Dell to take away drives when they replace them, and you have to pay to keep the old one (strange and unhelpful if you ask me). So I'm trying to decide whether it would be sensible for me to pull the thing apart and try to copy the data off it before they get here, or whether they're likely to do that themselves anyway. Anyone know from experience...? (I guess I could ask them, but I've spent hours on hold to them this morning already.)

Edited July 22, 2019 by BJG

[Fazza]

I can't imagine the Dell engineer will have time to do anything like that, they'll have factored in 10 minutes and a few minutes to get any built-in restore of the OS going and will then leave you to it (taking the HDD with them).

 

Pull it from the laptop now and see what you can get off of it.