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Macs have trouble booting legacy operating systems off external devices, but I've never had trouble booting anything off the internal drive, or booting off an external drive using EFI. At the moment, I'm running a Linux system off a firewire hard drive, with my bootloader, kernel, and initrd stored on the EFI protective partition of my internal drive.

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Hmmm. I've never been able to get Fedora installed from USB to the point it will let me boot off the Fedora partition. I'll try again with Ubuntu and see if I can get that working, then move from there to another distro.

Thanks for your input; I appreciate it.

You won't be able to install via usb because refit/efi won't enable usb booting. You can use the internal dvd drive for installation however -- or replace the drive with a hard drive containing the installation medium.

Best way to do this is to partition your first drive into 3 partitions before installing OSX using disk utility pre-installation. Install OSX, bootcamp, windows, then linux. Then you're free to remove your dvd drive if you prefer using a hard drive in that bay, but you'll need the drive for OS installations.

Thanks for your advice. I was trying to do it without tripple-booting (no need for Windows), but I'll go ahead and give it a shot.

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