Well if you lost the recovery partition or files in that and went out to buy a brand new full install disk you would face the same thing there too.
The one advantage a full install disk offers while still losing all of the preinstalled programs is that you can take that drive right out and upgrade to a large capacity model since you will still need to download all drivers for the board, video and sound as well as buy or download the programs you had been running.
The files stored in separate folders on the drive generally will still be right there on the drive unless the primary partition is reformatted where everything is then wiped off of the drive. If you have some files on the drive now you can't lose like family photos one option for rescuing those would be to buy a 2 1/2" external drive enclosure and plug that into another system for temporarily storing files there.
Those simply plug into a usb port on another Windows machine where you can browse the drive there as well as copy files from it. Once you have the drive available to another system you can also create a disk image if that type of program is installed or burn data disks(cd-r, dvd-r) and recopy them back onto the drive once Windows sees a clean install and is up and running again.