Mike,
I don't think you lost any of your Vista data. It sounds like you may have a grub problem. When you did the install, did you tell it to boot from the MBR? Vista wants it that way, but suse defaults to having it boot from the suse partition. That problem could be fixed by inserting the DVD and doing a reinstall and picking Boot from MBR when you have the chance.
You may have to fix the Vista MBR. That also is easy if you have the Vista CD. Search the forums for the many threads on multibooting with Vista.
Did you check out
swerdna's page on multibooting? That has gotten many people, including me, out of trouble. The instructions for suse 11.0 will work on 11.1 just as well.