My PS3 has recently died and thanks to the kindness of the playstation careline they are sending me out a replacement system, but before they collect my broken system I would like to do a backup of all the data on the hard drive.

Does anybody know if it is possible to take the hard drive out of my broken PS3 and put it into my friends PS3 to perform the backup of all the data and then format it?

And if it is possible will his PS3 be totally unaffected once I replace his hard drive and boot it back up?

Thanks!