Data recovery on Toshiba T3100 laptop

Hello, cctech! I recently recieved a call from a friend of a friend regarding a laptop that has come into her posession after a coworker of her died. She was doing some sort of environmental research, and all her work is stored on this computer. I tried taking the path of turning it on and just doing a copy that way. No such luck - the plasma display has a garbled and not stable display - text is garbled to the point that I can't read it, and it basically looks like it's about to go straight to hell. It does boot from harddisk - I feared that the plasma might be sensitive to power variations or something like that, and thus tried getting the machine apart. After struggling to get the harddrive in sight (the braindead (%(/% &(/?/&%# engineers at Toshiba made the screen cable plug