So...
... unless I find a way to recover them, it seems all my Norton backup files, those on the external hard drive and all my copies on DVD are either corrupt or gone. I am a bit numb, but starting over (one hopes older and wiser than the last time), is rarely really a bad thing. It's not as bad as it sounds in some ways, in some ways probably far 'worse', but what is it really? Data, photos, probably some stuff I'm really gonna miss, probably lots of crap I'll never remember I had... I'd been holding out hope after the crash since finding that the backup on the external wouldn't restore that these disks would be the treasure chest - they're a couple years old, but it would've been 'better', in the sense of less lossfull, than losing what I lost - and now I guess it's time to put that hope to rest and set myself moving forward again. Alright. I'll just think in terms of how many more bits I have by which to remember things even after this...