You can remove the drive from the laptop. you will have to purchase an adapter to convert the IDE pins on the hard drive to standard IDE pins. Then you can connect it to an IDE cable on another computer, be sure it isn't connected as a primary drive. When it boots up, you should be able look at it with Windows Explorer.
The PC you install it in should be running Windows XP with NTFS file system. If your laptop is using FAT32, as Windows 98SE, then you can install it into a Windows 98 PC & view it.