Removing .PE_Trats.A via clean install

Over the weekend my computer became infected with .PE_Trats.A. I went to TrendMicro's website and ran a scan. It told me there were 1703 instances of it on my machine (ouch). I've seen the various posts on the lengthy process of removing this trojan. I'd rather wipe my hard drive and do a fresh install. The question I have is this:

If I were to remove the infected hard drive from machine "a" and put the hard drive in an external case, then move my files that I want to save (word docs, photos, .pst outlook files) from the infected hard drive onto machine "x", then format the infected hard drive, and reinstall into machine "a", is it likely that I would then infect machine "x" in the process.

Is this a feasible way to back up my data from an infected hard drive so that I may format it and start fresh? I was due for a clean install anyway.

 

TimW - thanks for your help. I followed the Malware removal guide and computer is clean and running fine.