[PlanetCCRMA] Off-topic: (slightly) fedora 7 weirdness on MacBook C2D, please help

[Pablo Silva]

Hi!

After a rather heroic -and perhaps foolish- struggle, I managed to  
get a newer MacBook C2D triple-booting (MacOS, Fedora7 and XP). As  
has been pointed in the appropriate forums, the main problem to get  
this to happen is the partitioning scheme... My idea is to be able to  
run the three operating systems natively, as to be able among other  
things to run PlanetCCRMA.

I wanted to ask the readers of this list for help, as I have run into  
rather bizarre but systematic behaviour from Fedora 7 or GRUB (or  
maybe rEFIt, which controls booting) , which seems to rewrite the MBR  
(not the EFI partitioning scheme) of the startup disk EVERY TIME  
Fedora is run, flagging the linux partition as bootable instead of  
leaving the partitioning alone as would seem to me to be the natural  
option... and it's driving me nuts!

Before that, I found out, to my chagrin, that the Anaconda installer,  
both in Fedora core 6 and now 7, will rewrite the MBR even if asked  
to install to a previously ext3-formated partition, AND even if told  
specifically, to leave the partitions alone and not format...

I wonder whether any of the very experienced Linux users on this list  
would know how to fix this, as it's certainly not a very good idea to  
be perpetually rewriting an MBR!

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Pablo Silva
Laboratorio de Informática Musical y Música Electroacústica
Escuela Nacional de Música, UNAM