Recovery Is Possible

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RIP running in X11 resizing Linux partitions and viewing Wikipedia

Recovery Is Possible (RIP) is a small, specialized Linux distribution that includes a large number of system maintenance and recovery applications on a live CD. The disc is mainly oriented towards the experienced Linux user, and thus does not contain automated scripts for many common tasks (such as undeleting files, creating partitions, and the like). The RIP disc comes in two flavors: one with the X Window System and one without; usually, the non-X disc is released a few days after the X distro as the author takes time to compile and quickly test the build. The X-capable version does not require X to be started at bootup; it can be started at any time after booting without the server. The main purpose of X under RIP is to provide the capability to run GParted, a disk partition management program, and Mozilla Firefox, a web browser. MPlayer is also included and Firefox is shipped with the MPlayer plug-in extension to allow most embedded media on the web to be viewed.

Some common uses of RIP are the following:

TestDisk to recover deleted partitions, by ignoring the MBR and checking cylinders for known filesystem structures (such as FAT, NTFS, ext2/3, ReiserFS 3/4, XFS, etc)
PhotoRec to recover deleted files (not only photos) by ignoring the filesystem and checking disk blocks for known file types
fdisk, cfdisk, parted, and GParted (with the X11 version) for partition management
ntfsprogs (ntfsresize, ntfsclone, ntfsfix, mkntfs, etc.) in order to resize, backup/restore, schedule a chkdsk at Windows bootup, and perform other operations on NTFS filesystems
GNU ddrescue to recover data from failed media by copying data from one file or block device (hard disc, cdrom, floppy, etc) to another, trying hard to rescue data in case of read errors.