couple of questions:
- What operating system?
- What version of Lightroom?
- Sometimes the list of catalogs in File->Open Recent is only a partial list, did you search your hard drive(s) for *.LRCAT files?
- What do you mean by "catagories"? (There is no Lightroom construct known as a "category")
- when you say "all of my edits and catagories that I had been using for the past few days were gone", does this imply that the photos are present, but edits and categories (whatever they are) are not present; or does this imply the photos aren't present either?
- what did you do to "reload" the original catalog?