backup, reformat and restore

When I first set up my daughter's iMac, I did a bootcamp partition on her hard drive (40Gb) that we have never used. Now her hard drive is critically short of space and I would like to get rid of the partition. I know I have to reformat the drive to do that. My worry is how to best go about doing that - I know I need to back up her drive to an external disk - but what is the best way to go about this. I would really like a step by step how to - do I use time machine? How can I be sure time machine did a FULL backup, of everything? And if it did ... is it going to restore the partition? We have legal copies of all her software, but one program she uses a lot (Final Cut Pro Studio - through a school licence) is no longer available to her (lost disks). Also, it won't work on Lion, apparently, she uses Snow Leopard. Her iMac is about 2 years old.
Can I get a "Dummies" guide set of step by step instructions? I am really nervous about this.

Squirrel13 said:

When I first set up my daughter's iMac, I did a bootcamp partition on her hard drive (40Gb) that we have never used. Now her hard drive is critically short of space and I would like to get rid of the partition. I know I have to reformat the drive to do that.

Click to expand...

No you don't.

You just run the Bootcamp assistant again and you'll find an option to remove the bootcamp partition.