Yes,
A few months ago my whole computer shut down and I had to restore it. i lost every file on the computer but it was ok becasue I had most of them backed up.
I don't remind formating, infact, I somehwat like it no matter how odd that sounds, anything important is already on a disc anyways, formating gives me a fresh new computer basically.
I had a hard drive fail on me once. I lost some stuff, but not too much. Maxtor have a great warranty service too so I had a replacement within a couple of days.
Usually if the OS fails I just boot off another drive, rename the windows folder and re-install so I don't loose anything.