ps3 dead

watching hankock on blu-ray with my ps3 after the queens speach.lol
half way through it froze.ejected disk.put back in,will not pick up disk,try a game the same ,took it back to currys (i got it in march this year.)they told me to try an audio & standared dvd.still no disk can be played.did a full format.But looks like the drive is us..phoned fony and sending a referbed one out to me on the 2nd.should i take the hard drive out and keep it or should i jest forget about it as it is only a 40 gb drive?
other thing is all my saves,downloaded content are now gone.
kids are driving me nuts over this as they cant play little big planit till next week..

Common error, call up sony and they will sort out a replacement. Up to you if you remove the HDD or not, they usually swap the console on your doorstep.

do you have access to the XMB at all ?

If so try a full backup to another usb drive then restore it once new ps3 arrives

You will AFAIK not be able to use old ps3 hd in new ps3 and have everything as it was.

If you send hd with ps3 to sony ...

"Please note that the following copy-protected content will not be transferable:

Digital Right Management (DRM)
PlayStation® format software game data
PlayStation®2 format software game data
PLAYSTATION®3 format software Game Save Data flagged as unexportable"