I have music and movies on my computer but need to do system restore?

If you have two partitions, drive C: for your Operating System and applications, and drive D: for data (in this case your music and movies) you can make any required changes, including re-installing the OS entirely, to drive C:, without affecting your data.

Separating your data from the OS and apps partition is actually (at least in my opinion) a best practice for exactly the reason that you can wipe and re-build or restore your C: drive at any time without worrying about your data.

Having said that you should also back up your data on drive D: (or anywhere else) to cover yourself. This is easiest using an external USB-based hard drive if you have one or can borrow one. The choice of target media depends on the volume of data you have, so if it's relatively small it might even fit on a jump drive.

The easiest way to do this is using the xcopy command which is very effective for copying large volumes of files. Open a command prompt and type "xcopy /?" and read the options carefully, and you will get an idea of why. Two noteworthy options are "/s" to copy all subdirectories and "/d" to copy only new or changed files from the source to the target. In particular the latter option is significant if for some reason the copy operation stops or is interrupted, it will pick up where it left off.

By the way, unless you are 100% sure you don't care about any other data, you should review the local "My Documents" folder structure for any files, pictures et cetera you may want to copy to drive D: also. In addition if you run the Find command (Start / Find or windows-F key) and set the options to search for anything modified in the last 30 days for example, you may find files you didn't realize you needed to keep.

Good luck.

p.s. To the other posters note on anti-virus, if you don't have a good one already check out Avast!. Their free version offers a lot of functionality, I just switched to it from Anti-vir, which I like but the free version doesn't do as much as avast.

If they are on D drive they will be ok. I would do a virus scan of the D dirve also. System restore will not get rid of viruses tho. Unless you're talking about a compleat reinstall of the OS and all programs. You should still use a good antivirus program tho.

I have music and pictures on my computer and have done system restore and it didn't erase my stuff. There are some free virus protection on the web, you just have to do a search. They work well.

System restore will not remove your saved files, but the virus might be saved in the restore history.

Maybe if you only format the c drive but can't guarantee it back them up!

Is D a physically separate drive or a logical drive? If separate, ok, if logical...uhoh...

Burn them off to a CD or DVD