I made a partition with bootcamp and installed refit. I got the full slackware 13 dvd- they were four files and I burnt the .iso one to dvd. Then I put in the DVD, rebooted, and got into the reFit menu. But instead of a penguin, there was an icon with 4 gray diamonds. I selected it anyway and got as far as a black screen that said: 'Non-system disk Press any key to reboot'. How do I fix this and get into the Slackware install menu? Thanks for the help.

edit: Forgot to mention this, but I checked the md5sum of the iso on the burnt dvd with the md5sum that came with the download and they matched.

Did you get the right distro for your platform? It looks like what used to happen to me when I would try to boot windows with a floppy disk in the drive. Check the boot device sequence, and make sure it looks reasonable.

How do I check the boot device sequence on a mac book (running snow leopard)? It seems that refit/os x doesn't recognize the dvd I put- it just shows the legacy os icon. I also tried making a bootable usb drive by going to windows and using unetbootin. Doesn't work either. In both using dvd and usb drive, os x doesn't recognize the them as start up disks. I've tried pressing c key, alt key, Command-Option-Shift-Delete during boot for both. Maybe for the usb drive, its because I used FAT32 formatting so os x can't boot from it? Though I couldn't try doing it with HFS+ journaled formatting since windows doesn't recognize it. *bangs head against wall*

I can't help much there, as I don't own a mac. With the typical i386, there is usually a key combination you press in the boot sequence to enter the bios, but I don't know if macs even have a bios!

Try installing syslinux on it instead. You may be able to boot your linux distro with that.

I don't know. If macbooks use a bios, what the bios can read determines what you can boot, not os x. But I don't know if macbooks have a bios.