It installs a new boot partition at the beginning of your HD. All of your files should be intact, but you are going to need to to quite a bit of work to get your system working again.
I had a similar issue with a different bootloader. What I had to do was create a bootable Firewire drive with two partitions. Install Mac OS X on one partition. The other partition was black, but large enough for my MacBook's contents.
I booted off the external drive, used Carbon Copy Cloner (don't forget to donate!) to get the data off my MacBook (which was visible then), re-partition my MacBook's drive (using Disk Utility), and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the contents back.