I am currently overseas (i.e., very far from my normal library of tools) and my primary machine that would normally act as the data server in the performance test that we're trying to run is failing to boot to Fedora 12 properly. This is a machine that, as of yesterday, was booting fine. However, this morning, very strange portions of the boot process were complaining with messages such as "unexpected 0x0 in rpcbind" and "bad file descriptor" (I don't have the error in front of me - scavenged a windows installation to get onto serverfault).

Eventually, the boot hung for a long time at the NFS service and then brought up what looked like the KDE login screen but neither the mouse nor keyboard functioned.

In olden days, I would try to get to a point where I could manage to run fsck and pray that the bad sectors would come back into alignment just long enough for me to scrape the critical data off of the machine. However, now that we live in the future, it seems like our options in situations like this should be a little more varied.

Is there a way to recover a Fedora 12 installation with bad disk sectors that won't boot properly? For completeness, I am comfortable working with bootable recovery distros-on-CD and such but I don't know which one is likely to work best with modern Fedora.

In the absence of guidance, I'm frantically torrenting the Fedora 12 Live CD and DVD, hoping to try rescue mode before tomorrow morning.