Problems booting after converting Windows partition to Fedora

[cma37]

Hello- Sorry in advance- I don't know what the hell I am doing, so this might be unnecessarily long winded.
A friend of mine installed linux on my computer about a year ago in a dual boot set up. I didn't take the time to learn anything about it until Window crashed. Thinking I had all my files backed up, and wanting to force myself to learn linux, I followed these instructions:
http://www.techotopia.com/index.php/...o_Fedora_Linux
After which two problems arose:
1) I had dropped my external hd shortly after backing everything up, and had thought nothing of it- however, I later found that none of the files I had recently moved were still there.
2) I converted my FAT and NFTS partitions to ext3 following the instructions above- except now I can only boot in single user mode (then typing startx) because things aren't mounting properly. I think I screwed up grub.conf- following the "Editing the Boot Menu" section of the instructions- I didn't know which values to change and what the values should be changed to (default=value it says in the instructions)- I'm confused by the whole hd(0,0) designation. I don't know if I screwed up fstab as well, but I can successfully mount this new partition in single user mode.
Sorry, I've scoured the internet and pestered my friend- he uses Ubuntu now- and have come up with no answers.
If you need information on my gparted, or my grub, or fstab, I'll post what I can.
Lastly- is there any chance to recover leftover windows data from it new mounted ext3 partition? gparted says there is about 1 gig of space used on this partition- is this just space taken by default by the hd itself?
If there is no chance of me getting these files back, would it be best if I just reinstalled?- I have nothing of value on my linux- and am using an older Fedora- v. 6 I think- so it would probably be something I should do anyway.