I've just had a nice suprise - I took my old (windows) laptop in to the shop I bought it from for a new HDD and I asked them to clone the stuff on the data partition but not to bother with the C:\ drive as there was nothing vital on it apart from a couple of installed apps that I could get myself. I was expecting a blank partition and a data partition with music and documents. What I got was a nice new (not borked!) HDD with twice the capacity and my C:\ drive intact, meaning that I don't need to waste 6 hours reinstalling windows!

Huzzah for nice suprises!

Huzzah!