There is hope!!!!! I turned off my computer and drive out of frustration and turned it on again for one more "try" before totally giving up. It was visible this time. Now i'm moving my most used runtimes back to my laptop (and so far so good). Then i'm going to try and test my luck and take the drive to my desktop and copy all of the runtimes over there. So hopefully with some luck and a few prayers, maybe I can salvage my runtimes. As for only installing what I use... that's what I do. I'm a total mizer when it comes to hard drive space and I delete everything I don't use. There are some figures that I use more than others, so those are the runtimes that I'm moving to my laptop, plus my lighting, poses, props, mermaids, and faeries runtimes. The rest I'm going to leave on the external drive and chance my luck at getting them copied to my desktop for safe keeping.

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi