Linux and the master boot record problem

Recently I purchased a new 1TB drive for my computer. I was running out of space and could not backup my main drive of 500GB without a larger drive. Since the price has come down since they been released I bought a Western Digital and installed with no problem.

After I had this new larger drive I decided that I should try installing Linux on my main computer but use another disk, my old backup for the Linux install. So I first changed the boot up process in BIOS, from the 500GB to the 250GB, then installed Fedora11 64bit version.

Fedora installed with no problems, even got Wine to install AND run Photoshop CS2! But I noticed that I could not change the audio setup. Then I installed the video drivers, ATI 3850 video card, after that I lost video on reboot. Yikes!

At this point I decided to try Ubuntu 9, to compare the differences between the drivers and application install process. Also I wanted to see how hard it was from using YUM vs APT-GET or DEB packages. When I did the install of Ubuntu on the same 250GB the install crashed out and couldn't reinstall, in fact I couldn't reinstall any OS on the same drive.

I was really worried that I might have lost my Vista partition on the main 500GB drive, sure enough I loaded it up and got a blue screen of death. Lucky for me I had a simple USB to SATA device so I saved all of my data but this wasn't the path I wanted to take upgrading my pc. lol

Once all of my data was safe, I disconnected the 1TB backup drive, the 250GB drive, and just enabled the 500GB main drive. Restarted the Vista install and Windows would hang upon reboot. Even after scrubbing the entire drive, I would still see this error. So I asked in forums and most of the answers were about the master boot record. The master boot record (MBR) holds the data of how to boot an OS, if this is missing, the computer is not sure where to load the OS. It's similar to a starter on a car, the engine could be working just fine but can't start without the starter. The starter is only needed once the engine is turned off, but always needed to start up.

After being really stuck on this issue, I finally just tried to reinstall Ubuntu but this time I removed all of the partitions from the installer, and created a new partition. I did this many times before but just for luck, tried it again. As luck would have it, Ubuntu installed with no problems!

Once it was safe that it's running good, I started to down load the drivers I needed. I found both of my video card and sound card were working with their Linux 64 bit drivers, very happy! Then I installed some extras, but so far it's working great!

Now, I'm still confused by this problem and asked my Dad about it. We both think that the Vista installer could not erase the MBR correctly and only when using Ubuntu the installer over wrote the MBR.

Either way, this is a nice Linux install, now only if I could get Photoshop CS2 to work with Wine again. :)