Update on my situation:
I have got a new, new harddrive, and after staying up all night, I've managed to pull off the most important stuff from my old disk.
Had to replace my CPU fan, since it just gave up the ghost, too.
Scandisk is slowly cleaning up the copies I've made... been running for a few hours now...
Some files were crosslinked five ways, it seems.
If all goes well
I should be able to restore my c-drive image, and be back in business tomorrow.