I backed up the hard drive. I am sure I can get that back. I didn't remove the hard drive, though. I am amazed that Dell went so far out of its way to give me exactly what I did not want.
A large part of the trouble is the boot sector jiggery-pokery that I will have to redo to get UEFI removed.
If Dell explicitly agreed via some kind of contract to not touch the HD then their bad. Did they? It's more likely for some local tech-support company to be open to such a customer request.
