Another idea, possibly too late, is to partition your hard drive into two separate drives. My 40Gb hard drive has a main partition of 36Gb formatted as NTSF, suitable for Windows XP and most other things. The other is a 4Gb FAT32 partition so I have a storage area and somewhere to play old DOS games. I have done a reformat recently and all I had to do was zip up everything that needed backing up and copy it to the spare drive. Then I could reformat my Windows drive with no worries.
