Separate posts by categories

hello. i am strugling for few days already with a problem. Thing is that i want on my index page to display posts of all categories (precise 4 out of 5) on lets say main post feed, AND i want 5th category to be displayed in one div, thats positioned on right side in a little news feed. That would be like little news, and first posts would be big news. Now i just cant make loop work for what i want :S now even date has stoped working for my posts, its not displaying it anymore… code of what i have is below

<div id="news-content">
    <?php query_posts("post_per_page=5"); ?>

          	<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>     

      <div class="news">
        <h1><?php the_category();?></h1>
        <h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
        <div class="news-picture"><img src="wp-content/themes/BLANK-Theme/images/novost.jpg" width="331" height="218" /></div>
        <div class="text-news">
        <p><?php the_excerpt(); ?></p></div>
      <h3><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">more...</a></h3>
        <h3><?php the_date(); ?></h3>
      </div>     <!--END news-->
       	<?php endwhile; ?>
		<?php endif; ?>
 </div>    <!--END news-content-->

    <div id="sidebar">
    <h1>hit news</h1>
      <div id="hit-news">
          	<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> 

             <div class="small-news">
           <!-- limiting size of post in words-->
          <p><?php $excerpt = get_the_excerpt(); echo string_limit_words($excerpt,15); ?></p>
          <p class="date"><?php the_date(); ?></p>
            <p><a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>">op?irnije...</a></p>

        </div>
 <?php endwhile; ?>
		<?php endif; ?>    

      </div>  <!--end HIT-NEWS

maybe you can see what im trying to do :S and i just dont know what to try anymore, i tryed warious methods, excluding categories etc… but either im not using methods right or i didnt make entire index right… hopefully some1 can help

furthermore, if i ad picture as media in post, how do i display it in lets say div class=image, whats the method to call it. also tried few, and nothing works. cheers