Anything from partition problems to physical broken disks can be treated with the proper software and patience. The Open Source community offers many free alternatives to deal with problematic storage situations. It is a great solution to backup and restore installations, it is available for Debian, Suse, Gentoo and Red Hat based distributions. Mondo Rescue calls itself a disaster recovery solution. You can get System Rescue CD at: Mondo Rescue
It contains recovery tools including Gparted, Ddrescue and TestDisk named above among others, this software has the advantage of being operable by blind users. Another Linux distribution to run from CD or USB.