My laptop is now back, with a new hard-drive... that contains nothing but a bare-bones OS. My old HD is currently in an external case, waiting for me to try copying as much data from it as is recoverable.

Total damage: pretty close to USD $200, plus the time spent reinstalling and configuring my software, and generally settling myself back into my machine, etc. (Amusingly, if I wasn't concerned about recovering my data, I could have bought a laptop with the same specs for the same amount.)

My apologies if I don't respond for another day or two while I finish various other tasks.