Help! I seem to have got myself into a terrible mess with catalogues, etc.

Morning all,
I have an issue which is causing me endless grief:
Recently, I upgraded from 3.0 to 3.4 and on the same day tried converting all my RAW files to .dng in the belief that this would save me hard disc space and allow me an extra degree of security (having the changes written into the file). However, during this conversion of 36,000 files, there was a power cut and the catalogue became corrupted, so I can no longer return to that catalogue.
No problem. I simply re-imported all my files to my HD from my external back-up drive and added them to my catalogue, causing many thousands of duplicate files, spread across different folders. The catalogue doesn't contain any duplicates, however.
(I would like to point out that, in my defence I was, following surgery, acting under the influence of some very heavy pain killers when I made the decision to do all of the above. It semed like a good idea at the time.)
Now this has completely maxed out my internal drive and I don't know how to remove the duplicate files from the HDD except to go through them manually, one-by-one, which isn't really an option. I could just swap out the HDD for a new one, but would that lose me all the work I'd done on files imported since?
Can anyone recommend any software for doing this, or a routine within LR that could save me all my changes, or am I just going to have to face up to losing a whole lot of work here?
I really would appreciate some help with this as it's putting a strain on my ability to work and, as a result, my marriage too (really!) So, please save me from the divorce lawyers!
Nick.

Hal,
Yes, I see what you're getting at, and that would work if all of the duplicates weren't in just one LR catalogue folder. That's 30,000+ duplicates in one folder. I'd go ahead and delete them all, but the trouble is that it also contains copies of files that aren't in the catalogue that I'd like to retain access too. I can't see a way round that, but maybe you can. A venn diagram would probably be really helpful at this point, I think...
Frank,
That's the technique that works if there are dupes in the catalogue, right? I don't have those.
But you're right about pain, and pain-killers: makes you do some crazy stuff. I'm only just getting round to putting the pieces back together after the removal of some very troublesome wisdom teeth; I can't imagine how much worse it would have been if I'd been crippled with back pain.
I think what's happened here is that I've reached an understanding of the problem without the actual answer coming from you guys - and I mean no disrespect whatsoever. It's forced me to think VERY hard about my system and how I back-up - or not - and how best to proceed from now on.
So, having read a lot of David Marx's blog posts, I think I'll be folloing his example in 3-2-1 back-up procedure in future. I'll also be having a "Year Zero" event on my workstation and changing to Win7, re-naming my HDDs in order and switching to an external HDD for running my catalogue and image files side-by-side, which will make syncing with the new laptop much easier.
Lastly, given that sorting through 30,000+ dupes in one folder and then checking them against the contents of all my other folders could take a year, I've decided to go the whole hog and archive almost all of my catalogue except my folio images (they get built into my website from the Lightroom Galleries plugin, so I need access to them on a regular basis) which I can re-work in less time than I would spend trawling through the whole HDD, and start afresh with a proper, logical system.
This has been a painful and potentially costly lesson, but it could have been so much worse. At least I have my RAW archive...
Thanks once again,
Nick.
EDIT. Wait. Maybe I have it. Hal, (or anyone) could you let me know if you think this might work:
Delete the entire folder of 'duplicates and everything else', then reimport the contents of my RAW archive into the top level LR folder. LR should then auto-reject suspected duplicates, and replace the non-duplicate contents of the folder that were lost when I deleted the dupes-and-all folder.
D'you reckon that'd do it?

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