Acessing a failing laptop drive(XP)

One of my friend's has a laptop that won't boot, and it's quite obviously a problem with the hard drive. She's currently seeing if it's possible to get a new drive from Dell and keep the other...more on that later.

Anyway, I mentioned if she sent me the drive I should be able to pull the info off of it. My question is if I use something like my IDE to USB converter, will I run into any security issues? I know she's not running any 3rd party encryption applications, and probably not much within windows.

I don't recall ever having a problem accessing drives like this, but I've been told you can't do it. Not being at home, I don't have the equipment to test this out, so maybe someone here could help me out before she sends the drive to me.

I've used a USB laptop drive caddy to access files from another machine before, you shouldn't have any access problems.

i also have used a laptop hdd encloser to get files of the hdd with no problems.

Yeah...just double checking before we have the drive shipped to me. I'm pretty sure I've done it in the past as well...