perhaps true, but you can also opt with grub, at least, to install it to the first sector of your linux partition and it’ll never touch the MBR.
i’m still going to allocate some of the blame to the mix of this being the first time i’ve actually made an xp account “private” and trying to turn around and read that stuff back off with vista, since that was the new condition this time (out of dozens of times) with me working on a triple boot setup, and then some of the blame for me being a dumbass and not backing up to optical media as soon as my computer hit the fan, and a bit of it on my habit of selecting the non-quick format when making install partitions with windows (came into play later on when the windows xp cd failed to even boot after i hit the reset button while creating a new partition, not sure entirely why that screwed stuff over…)
in any case, the data i stored on a backup partition is gone to any software tool, to find that you’d have to read it with some fancy schmancy hardware. nothing but straight zeros. So I’m giving up on getting that back, and clean installing xp and linux and vista to try again to see if they can peacefully coexist…