You may want to think about buying another Hard Drive. 40-60GB IDE's are affordable (if you are a student disregard this!
) and you can use it as your OS drive. That way the format won't kill anything.
Although if you do this too much you end up like me. I have three systems right now.. My main system has 4 x 120GB (1x IDE, 3x SATA) and my backup system has 3 drives (1x60, 2x 20 all IDE), and my print server has 2x 6GB IDE.