Well. It wasn't good news around these here parts, computer-wise. Nothing we did could fix the problem, so we had to do a complete erase and install on the hard drive. Then it took a long time to get everything back the way it was because when I purchased my backup program I didn't go for "pro" (no one explained it to me) which means that my mini-drive wasn't bootable - had it been, this would have taken three hours less. But he got everything back the way it was and working fine (and faster) - because it wasn't bootable, he had to resinstall a lot of drivers for various software things. Hopefully everything will work fine now, and I'm going to upgrade to pro so if this ever happens again it will be much more quick. It took a total of five hours, which is going to cost me puhlenty.