Reformating my Mac HD - Will this work?

[The_Decemberist]

Ok, here is what's going on. I tried partitioning my Mac's HD boot drive and it crashed, so it registered my free HD space minues the 30gigs that teh partition was. (Basically I have less space than I should)

I've made a back-up using Time-Machine on a usb HDD.

I intend to erase my mac hdd and reinstall Leopard, then restore my backed up data with time-machine.

Will this work, or wil it just restore my system the day it was, broken partition and all?

Thanks for any comments.