System-Recovery starts always when booting !

[tikitin]

I messed up something. I accidentally pressed F11 at startup, and when I was asked if I want to start the System-Recovery, I had a temporary attack of insanity and I pressed "y". After some time I got the first screen of the installation procedure. I was told that if I press Abort, my hard disc will remain untouched. I pressed "Abort".
But now when I start the machine, it always wants to go to System-Recovery. When I am asked if I want to start the System-Recovery, I press "n", and the machine reboots. But only to present the same question all over again. I tried turning off the power, but when I restarted, I ended up again with the question "Do you want to start the System-Recovery? y/n"

If I messed up something for good, and I have to reinstall the operating system, does that mean that I will lose everything I now have on the hard disc?

I am able to enter BIOS at startup, but once I get out of the Bios, I go to the System-Recovery.

As you can see, I am a newbie with Linux, please help!

[mikez]

Time to learn a new tool:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Download
You will probably need an external CD drive and access to another machine to burn the image.

It is possible that your files are already gone - that message about not touching the disk drive
may have come to late in the "recovery" process (which may have wiped the disk to start over).

Once you boot from the sysrescd - just let it default through the various options for now;
no need to set a password for "root" unless you will be using ssh from another machine -

if not a command line wiz - enter: startxfce4

if missing basic *nix skills, just re-post about how far you have gotten - -
someone can walk you through mounting your internal disk drives and/or making backups
with partimage. (Your running in a ram disk for all of this; does not change the internal disk.)