Saving Data on Reformated Drive

I have a HP Pavilion that I purchased almost 2months ago that has a partitioned drive for backup. I am planning on updating to Vista on my laptop but was going to reformat the HDD so I won't have a partitioned drive with 15GB for backup. The problem with this is, I don't want to lose all my data, programs, files... don't want to lose ANYTHING. I was planning on uploading all the files that I want onto my desktop's HDD or an external HDD. But what about all my drivers, won't I lose those too? I don't want to go through the hassle of installing all those drivers.



Can I get any advice I what to do here? How can I reformat my HDD when I update to Vista but not lose any drivers or programs.

I just did this with my Dell, I had to fight with dell to get my Drivers disk, but I ended up getting them. I'm pretty sure you need a drivers disk, but I could be wrong. I know when I did this I went into the Drivers folder to see if the drivers were already there and they were not there, so I had to use the disk. I'm not sure if there is another way or not.

You get a partition program that will allow you to only delete the partition and not reformat

if i get a partition program to delete my partition, i will be able to use that partition space correct? Are will it be unusable until I reformat the WHOLE HDD?