rescue from Live USB?

[David L]

My 4 year old just tripped over my laptop's power
cord and it smashed into the hardwood floor.  :(
The hard drive appears to have been somewhat
damaged, but still kinda sorta works.  But
it no longer boots to Fedora 11 successfully... it
gets a kernel panic, presumably due to a corrupt
or missing file.  I have a Fedora 11 live USB.  Any
chance I can use that to recover the earlier Fedora
installation without a re-install?

If I do have to do a re-install, I'd like to preserve
whatever might be salvagable from my existing
f11 partition, which is an LVM partition that is only
about half full.  Can I use gparted to shrink that
partition and create a new partition for a new
installation?  I'm not too familiar with LVM and
would prefer to use an old-school partition for
any new installation.

On a different topic, if this doesn't work out
for me... any recommendations on a good
bang/buck laptop for <$450 without a
Windows tax that works well with f11?


Thanks...

            Dave