hard disk partition table crashed!
 

Earlier, while i was installing fedora 8 on my laptop with 60GB hard disk partitioned in 4 partitions (with one having windows xp black in it),and 512MB of RAM, the installer could not detect the hard disk. later on, it detected it but the partition table was lost. while creating new partitions, i found that whole of the hard disk was being shown as one partition (that too as "free space").
is there any solution to get the entries in partition table back or in other case get the data safely and install a linux distribution in it.

Try using testdisk to repair the partition table (you can use it from the Ultimate Boot CD or several live CD's).

For data recovery, try using photorec.