There should be an option to go to the recovery console, or to reinstall windows. Go the latter and it should detect an old Windows installation, which then has an option to repair. I did this about 1.5 years ago and it worked fine. The only things that broke were programs (like MS Office) and such that required files that were removed (registry keys and such as well). But all the data was left in tact.
If the above fails somehow, I recommend you download (or get somehow) the Knoppix CD. It's a CD-bootable Linux OS (if you didn't know) which will detect all your windows partitions and allow you to make backups through it.
