yeah, the safest bet is to fire up your hard drive on another machine (or via your mates usb thingy).
You should then be able to get everything you need before formatting or sending back the drive.
I often back up to zipstick AND DVD and sometimes to an external hard drive I've got (very handy for things like this) as windows is never failsafe

Hope you get it sorted arran, I find it more frustrating having to get the system back to a usable state afterwards (usually a half day job installing, updating, securing etc).
Si