Oh lordy.. seem to have borked my partition table
 

I am in serious, serious, trouble.

This is my second time installing Linux. I have/had XP and formerly RedHat9.... according to a review I read, Yoper supposedly was really easy to install and 'walked you through' the installation process. So I put the image on a CD, started the installation, typed 'yoper' at the prompt and went from there. Then it got to the partition sectionn.

Hoo boy, what a mess.

Yoper opened up QTParted, which I've never used before. It didn't really explain what to do.. and so I reformatted the old *Linux* partitions (I did NOT reformat the Windows partitions, unless it did it without asking), thinking the installer would take over from there.

Turns out that nothing happened. Now the computer loads into grub, which I have no idea how to use, and I saw some kind of error message stating that there was no partition table. I know enough to know that this is extremely bad... I seriously hope that my stuff is recoverable.

I need this fixed by about... now. Really I could go without a computer for a while, in theory, but I need it by Sunday if possible.

And no, there is no IRC client on the machine I'm posting from.. which complicates things. I think it would explode if I tried to install one.

Anyway, what's step one in solving this? I know that I need to provide more information, but I don't know what or how.

I'm sweating bullets here.. this is a really bad situation. Help!!!!!

try restarting and booting XP.
If you can't do that i don't know what to do. I would guess you probably would have to rewrite the partitions by hand however i am not sure.
If you are looking for another distro i think Mandrake is easy to install and to create partitions with.

Yeah, well
 

That's the problem. When I turn the machine on, it goes straight to GRUB.

I'm not having problems with Yoper yet.. I haven't even finished installing it!

Try to recover your stuff with LiveCD. Any of them would do.

Do you have a Windows boot disk laying around? WinMe or Win98 ... or get one at bootdisk.com.
Boot up with that and type: fdisk /mbr
That should get you back into windows if it is still there.

I haven't gotten into recovering windows yet, but I did manage to get Yoper to actually install. It's in the process, by the end of another half hour I'll know if I should explode in frustration or not.

I know, it's not on subject, sorry for hijacking.
I need tip on installing Yoper. System freezes right after partitioning

Well, now we get into more familiar territory - I'm not staring at a prompt like a deranged monkey.

DOS is not present in the bootloader (which I think is GRUB), and Yoper gives me something like this no matter what I do:

"Error 11: Unrecognized device string".

I also got a 'you should not be seeing this error message' that had something to do with ramdisk.

EDIT: Managed to get XP running. Will log on from that machine and use Partition Magic this time.