Stymied trying to repair disc

Here's the problem I'm trying to solve: I installed a game on my PS3 and it corrupted the drive. I installed the same game on my other PS3, and it corrupted the drive. (I sense a pattern here.) That second PS3 was given to me by my best friend before he killed himself, and contains a fortune in games, as well as hundreds and hundreds of hours of game saves. The PlayStation's own repair software is lame, lame, lame. Players have taken their drives out and repaired them using Windows boxes. I don't have access to one.

But I can use Unix! Yay! I'll just download one, install it, and repair my discs, and then I'll be a happy girl!

Boy, what a nightmare this has turned out to be. All Unix distros are .iso files, and I can't burn a single one to disc ("no mountable file system," "invalid argument," or else I got a couple of files onto a disc that are .efi files that're small that don't look as if they're complete installs). Found a terrific page telling me how to use the Terminal to get the files onto a USB stick, and I almost squirted, it seemed so easy! Alas, that's yielded a big fat goose egg, too: "Operation not supported."

I've tried Ubuntu, Lubuntu, and Mint. I have no reason to believe that any other flavor will work, because invalid argument, no mountable file system, operation not supported.

This shouldn't be that hard! I'm almost out of tears at this point. All I want to do it to repair my (FAT) disc. My Mac is old (2007 dual 2.8 Ghz) but it still oughtta be capable of doing this. I'm not trying to do anything fancy. ALL I want to do is to attempt to repair the one disc (and if it works, I'll tackle the other one) and then be done with it and get back to my gaming. I'm a disabled vet, meaning I haven't the resources to take it to a proper repair place (and I prolly just have a couple bad sectors. Most players do who've experienced what I have).

Has anyone got any useful info for me? I'm at my wit's end. I'd be soooo grateful for some advice to get me going again.

Thanks for anything you can offer.

Binky