[gentoo-user] Hard Drive Crash - Please Help

[Grant]

Hello, I woke up this morning and turned on my laptop to find that it
no longer boots.  It initially hung on starting hald, and once I
prevented hald from starting it hung on gdm, and once I prevented gdm
from starting I could log in as root but vi failed with a "Bus error".
 I booted a LiveCD, mounted /dev/hda3, and chrooted, but running
env-update then caused all kinds of drive errors.

I'd like to save the hard drive so I don't have to buy a new one and
build a new system on it, but if that's not possible I'd definitely
like to save my personal data from the drive.  I'm busy/stupid enough
to have made no backups and all of my photos etc. are on the drive.

I successfully wrote an iso of some important files after booting up
normally (minus hald, X, and vi) so that's good.  Is there a utility I
can run on the disk to see if there is permanent damage?  Should I try
re-emerging packages that are having trouble or should I try to emerge
-e world?

I suppose I should see if I can write and burn iso's of everything in
/home/grant/ right away.  Is there a good way to get a bunch of data
into multiple iso's that are each no larger than 650MB?  Also, I've
read man mkisofs and experimented before with trying to preserve
filenames perfectly but it never comes out quite right.  Can anyone
recommend mkisofs options for preserving filenames perfectly?

Thanks for your time.

- Grant
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