There are ways of safely copying your stuff off before you wipe it. You need a spare drive big enough to hold whatever you want to save, and the patience to go through the whole drive and cherry-pick just the files you want to back up. If you just copy everything, you'll probably end up copying the virus as well. External USB drives are easiest to backup to, but regular internal hard drives can do the job faster if you're willing to open the computer to temporarily install one.
Anyways, short version, you need a clean rescue boot disk. Hook up the backup drive to the computer, boot up from the rescue disk, and then you should be able to copy files between the two drives in a virus-free way. I recommend SystemRescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/) if you're comfortable with Linux.
The long version is a bit more annoying since you need to know which drive is which, how to access them from a non-standard bootup, and how to search for and copy files between them in a non-sucky way.
Any veteran Linux user should be able to help walk you through it if you decide to try this with SystemRescue CD.
Of course, you may be able to find non-Linux rescue disks as well, but I don't know any personally. I happen to like the Linux one. :)
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Anyways, short version, you need a clean rescue boot disk. Hook up the backup drive to the computer, boot up from the rescue disk, and then you should be able to copy files between the two drives in a virus-free way. I recommend SystemRescue CD (http://www.sysresccd.org/) if you're comfortable with Linux.
The long version is a bit more annoying since you need to know which drive is which, how to access them from a non-standard bootup, and how to search for and copy files between them in a non-sucky way.
Any veteran Linux user should be able to help walk you through it if you decide to try this with SystemRescue CD.
Of course, you may be able to find non-Linux rescue disks as well, but I don't know any personally. I happen to like the Linux one. :)