I've read massive amounts of information about triple booting and no one ever talks about what happens if you want to reinstall windows for any reason after you had installed Windows, linux and OSX on a macbook pro with rEFIt, bootcamp and elilo.

It seems that everyone seems to get it right the first time. Well, I didn't save a copy of the masterboot record that Windows uses to boot, so when I went to install Ubuntu linux with parted, it messed up the MBR. The result was a "Non-system disk" error, and an unbootable windows partition.

I tried to recover the windows installation with its installation disk, but it wouldn't work.

I decided not to waste anymore time trying to recover the first windows installation, and decided to just reinstall.

The reinstallation went smoothly, but when I booted up, the rEFIt menu was entirely bipassed, and Windows XP booted on default, not before running into a system error.

So I decided to boot back into my OSX partition, but when I held the option button, only the windows partition was displayed. The windows partition took over the whole machine, and even IT wasn't bootable.

I tried using diskutil on the OSX installation CD in hopes of reformatting the windows partition and recovering OSX, but all the other partitions seemed to have just disappeared.

So I decided to start from scratch. I'm sure I could have tried to use a disk like ERD commander to fix the MBR, but I just didn't want to waste anymore time and take the chance of it not working. I probably should have at least tried though, because obviously, starting from scratch with all three operating systems, is an even bigger waste of time.

I just wanted everyone to know that you will run into this problem if you try to reinstall windows a second time after you had used rEFIt, bootcamp and elilo to boot all three OS's.

If anyone has any comments about this, let me know. I'm sure there a few possible things I could have done, but I hope that someone may have an idea as to how this could have been avoided so that no one else has to start from scratch like I did.

I'm not sure if this is the same problem, but I found out, that I couldn't even boot from Windows install CD if I have a linux with kernel 2.6.x installed. Only way was to either delete the whole linux partition ( just overwriting mbr didn't help) or to use a windows xp cd with servoce pack 1 integrated.

Anyway if someone has an explanation for this, I'm really curious to know, since I really don't know why windows gets affected by a linux with kernel 2.6.x since it works great with 2.4.x

Interesting! I haven't tried the 2.4.x kernel, so I'm unaware of why this would affect the bootability of the windows install CD.

If I had to take a guess, I would look into which boot loader the 2.4.x kernel was using, because dapper, with 2.6.x installed ELILO by default, not GRUB or LILO. Somehow, the MBR is getting overwritten.

I didn't pay attention to the tutorials because they strickly instruct the user to back up the MBR so that it can be remounted after the installation of LILO or ELILO. Have you tried this with kernel 2.6.x?

No, but I used different tools to overwrite MBR like fixmbr from Windows 2003 Server ( which did boot ) and old fdisk from DOS. None worked, the only option was to completely delete the linux partition and reinstall after Windows.

Anyway I use Slackware, which uses lilo as bootloader.

I would actually prefer to use Slackware, but it's been a year since I've used it. Is it hard to configure hardware in slackware? Particularly wireless? Does slackware update as frequently as Ubuntu?

I don't understand exactly what you are trying to say, if you have linux installed on the first primary partition, windows instalation will fail as windows insists on using the first primary partition.

You mean, yu were able to boot into Ubuntu and OSX but, not into windows ? If this is so, I don't think Ubuntu messed up MBR. You probably installed elilo to the windows partitions otherwise, it probab;y to do with rEFIt. I'm not too sure about this.

This might be irrelevant to what's posted here, but please forgive me.
This other day I restarted the computer and I couldn't boot into either Windows or Linux. So I went to buy another computer, but had the old dualboot hard disk installed into the new system. I used fdisk in Linux [FC3]and it said my old Windows partition is 121905[kb], it said it's too big, being bigger than 1024[kb]. I was trying to recover the old Windows partition due to many important files on it. Since I could get the files via new hard drive, I've copied the important files onto the new drive. If I were to get rid of Windows, can I install Suse or some other distro, in place of that Windows partition?

Thank you.

No I had Windows installed on first partition. I just want to say that with a linux with kernel 2.6.x Windows XP CD without at least SP1 integrated won't boot (cd won't boot - so no setup at all - it hangs with a black screen and a blinking cursor -, the former installed windows will). Since I've seen this effect quite a few times now, I'm sure it has something to do with kernel 2.6.x, it never happened when I used a kernel 2.4.x system.
And as I already said, it is no problem to reinstall windows xp when sp1 is integrated.

I didn't configure any wireless stuff so far in slackware, but I know from other users that it works quite well. In my oppinion it isn't hard to configure, since stuff just works the way it should and I think hardware recognigion is really good .
If you use current you have a really up to date system, though new releases just come when Pat Volkerding thinks it is time for a new one, usually once or twice a year.

Sure why not?