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Choosing Linux boots Windows
This can have many different reasons. Check these first:
- If you are trying to boot from a USB hard disk or other “external” drive, but the system boots another operating system from an internal drive instead, see USB Disks.
- If you have multiple internal disks, and the system boots an operating system from another disk than the one you chose in the menu, see Multiple Internal Disks.
If you just installed Windows, it is possible that you had the Linux boot loader (GRUB, LILO, etc.) installed in the Master Boot Record (MBR), and Windows overwrote that during installation. To do triple-booting with rEFIt, the Linux boot loader needs to be installed in the partition boot record (PBR) instead of the MBR anyway. To restore your Linux system to bootable state, boot a rescue system from CD and re-install the boot loader, making sure it goes into the PBR. For example, point it at /dev/sda3 (assuming Linux is on the third partition) instead of /dev/sda. In GRUB notation, that’s (hd0,2) instead of (hd0).
To check if the boot loaders are installed in the right places, you can run the “Partition Inspector” application that is on the rEFIt disk image, and is usually installed under /Applications/Utilities. It looks at the partitions and file systems on the first hard disk, and generates a report, including which boot loaders were found in each partition and in the MBR.