computer therapy

Sunday, just before noon, my computer 'died'... It just stopped starting and after a couple of resets I realized that this was no ordinary glitch but a real disaster. It didn't exactly come as a surprise either. I had been ignoring the occasional you-should-do-a-surface-scan-of-your-disk warnings for a long time.
So I removed the hard disk from my machine and plugged it into our spare computer/printer server and started the surface scanning routine. No problem. Several hours later the scan was completed and I put the disk back in its rightful place. However the expected happy feeling didn't materialize: All I had achieved seemed to be to exchange the nothing that originally happened with an interesting combination of error messages.
Now I ain't exactly Einstein but I must be just a little smarter than the guy who once decided that it was a good idea to rename every file retrieved during a disk scan "file0001.chk, file0002.chk, file0003.chk". What had happened was that my entire windows directory had been transformed into 9999 numbered files. What the h... is one supposed to do with 9999 unidentified files? It should be technically possible to come up with a slightly more meaningful solution?
Yes I know I should have had a system back up ready. But I didn't. And I'm almost ashamed to admit that actually finding the Windows installation disk took me the better part of a day.
The good news is, that I didn't loose any important files and that my computer is up and running after a long session of open heart formatting and reinstalling windows (twice)...
The bad news is that my incredibly funny and intelligent piece on comic heroes in Hollywood lighting probably will have to be reconstructed from memory.