…that was in fact a catastrophic hard drive failure. I brought it in, the lads at Geek City said “Oh dear, that’s not a virus, that error message means your hard drive has just gone bad, might as well buy a new one because it’ll cost as much to fix it to get a new one.”
Thank God for Dropbox. o.O
Turns out Fairbanks is not a great place to buy a new netbook, though. Which is mildly inconvenient, since I’d been planning to, y’know, work this week. But I’ll figure something out, I expect, and in the meantime, I haven’t lost six years worth of work. :)