The operating system is toast, though it looks like the data is OK -- right now I'm in the middle of getting another system installed in order to try to get the data ported over as safely as possible (and I'm hoping that whatever hosed significant parts of the file system on C maybe possibly left D alone? *fingers crossed! Eyes too!*)
BTW, here's the link to the next part. It's at the bottom of the chapter too, and there's a continued at the bottom of part 2 as well, but it seems to be really easy for people to miss it on account of it being right next to the comment link. Short of putting blink tags in, though, I dunno what to do to make it more noticeable... ^^;;