USB stick and some help with it.

[Quartz]

On second thought, you should ignore all these suggestions and use 
GParted Live:

http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/liveusb.php

It's specifically built for disk partitioning, formatting, and recovery. 
It will have every tool you could need, including memtest and SMART 
which might be worth running just to rule out hardware issues. I use it 
several times a week to check one thing or another, it's so second 
nature I almost forgot it existed.

Anyway, I'll stop spamming the list now.