Originally Posted by Kguru 
I've made a practice of dividing my laptop hdd into 2-3 partitions, one of which to hold data/docs and a ghost image of the (Win+programs) partition taken before the baddies have a chance to attack. Anything occurs, boot into Ghost and it takes just 10 minutes to restore Win+programs from the image. Has rescued me & my family dozens of times.
I have done this too. Helps me stay organized and protects me at the same time. I used a program called Partition Magic. Even allows partition resizing without having to reformat that partition