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My wifes lap suddenly refused to boot cleanly and a diagnosis with Redo confirmed the obvious; there are bad sectors on the / partition of that disk.
REDO is recommending a re-partitioning.
So how do we best do that without loosing data?
(I am making a total backup of that box now)

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1985816
and much more at google

Testdisk is on the systemrescuecd and that might help you copy off some or all of the data.

Thanks. I am actually using gparted in System rescue CD now sow we can only pray. Backups I have but it is a pain to set up Arch from scratch these days so I hope the data will survive.
The boot sector is fine and even plymouth works before the protesting and IO errors start...
I see a "doing it the hard way" in my future
....
GRR I am an absolute idiot - I had taken the lap to the boys room and forgot about the power supply - so it stopped in the middle of partitioning
Not much hope of saving those data now...

Try testdisk or photorec. testdisk can reset the partition table to a previous configuration, so you can see files before the format...

Oh wonder!
I checked the box with the REDO disk first. And the recomendtation was to re-partition. Then I booted the System rescue CD according to Guru-Berserk orders and reduced my Home partition (sda4) and streched the / partiton (sda3). Swap and boot partition were OK so I left them allone.
Sda3 was the fubared one.
I loaded the system rescue cd to memory - not the default start option - and eventually fired up gparted.

Then I ellegantly managed to interrupt my re-partitioning by letting the batery run out So I started all over again and rezizing the two partitions again, Gparted used most of the night to run and fix my errors.

It came through with a success message so I removed the CD and booted...
And it is all there as if nothing happened

REDO looks like a very good implementation of backup and disaster recovery tools. I have an external firewire-connected enclosure where I rsync the personal files I would really not like to lose on a "when the spirit moves me" schedule. The disk is powered off most of the time.

I'm curious about network shares, as I've never done that. Presumably, a networked drive could be used for backing up an image and restoring from it. However, doesn't the share need to be connected to a running OS? If that's the OS you're trying to restore and you can't boot it, how does REDO use it?

I have Only used REDO with the USB-disk directly connected to it. I have some boxes that simply do freeze completely when networkmanager starts so I do not want to complicate that with network settings - so
It is a Linux distro.
What I can say is that I have backed up and put back my Heavy duty Mandriva box with Windows on it - twice. No problem whatsoever.