My laptop works again. We can rebuild him.

I was digging through a lot of stuff the other day, looking for my Flash 5 disc because I was about ready to install it on the family computer and just use that on and off, and I found a little package of stuff that came with my laptop, still unwrapped. I opened it up and right in the front was "Instructions for disc-less system recovery." Apparently, the only thing standing between me and having access to my own computer was...F11. Sure enough, I started it up, held in the key, and it started re-setting itself up. At a cost, of course. I lost pretty much everything I ever had, except for two things: all my fonts were still installed, and by some miracle of the gods, Flash remained intact in its entirety, while every other program had to be reinstalled. It boggles my mind, but hey, I'm not gonna question it. The only major things I have yet to reinstall are Goldwave for recording and the like, and FL Studio and PXTone for making music. Oh, and an antivirus software. For some reason, even though I get it free with Comcast, McAfee won't install correctly for me. Not that it was helping much beforehand, but at least it'd be something until we bought something better.
As for all my animations though, long before this I had backed up all the FLAs (editable files) across two thumb drives. One had all the ones from my Windows ME (which was everything through An Apple A Day), and the other had the ones from my laptop (except for the most recent three, unfortunately). When I plugged in the first thumb drive, the zip file of FLAs was there, I copied it to my laptop and extracted everything, but for some reason, all that was there were about 15 random episodes (not even in any order or anything). I plug in the second drive, and there was no zip on there for the FlAs at all. So I no longer have access to more than half of my work now. Aside from the fact that I would just like to have them for backup or records or whatever, the main problem is without the FLAs, I can't change what needs to be changed within the cartoon to make it DVD compatible. I can't just download all the SWFs of the episodes off my site and convert them because syncing methods for web viewing aren't the same as when I convert them to video for Youtube or DVD. Not that there was really a sure fire thing about the DVDs, but I had finally figured out the right method for converting the cartoons and--before all this happened--was hoping to have a volume 1 out for the holidays. But it seems like now there wouldn't be able to be regular volumes, with all the episodes in their original order. They'd just be random selections of episodes and stuff.
Whatever though. There's nothing I can do about it, so there's no use doing anything now except to continue looking forward.