Windows 7 / Arch Linux Dual-Boot - win7 keeps changing the boot flag!

Greetings!
Its been a long while since I had to dual-boot with windows on the same machine.
I 've installed windows 7 and then arch linux and installed GRUB on my sda1 where the /boot partitions is located at.
I've managed to boot into arch successfully and later into windows also successfully.... but when i tried to boot into arch again I wasn't greeted with the typical GRUB boot screen... grub was ignored completely and win7 booting began as if it was the only OS in my hard drive.
I've used the gparted live cd and realized that the boot flag has changed from my /boot partition (sda1) to my windows partition (sda2). I've changed it back and I was able to boot into arch again. but when I rebooted to win7 and then to arch the same thing has happened. The boot flag keeps changing whenever im rebooting into windows making impossible for me to boot with GRUB unles I manually change the flag again.
I haven't installed GRUB into the MBR because I hear  it is a bad practice when you have a windows OS also installed (something with service packs not being able to install, among other things). I also don't want to use the easyBCD method to boot arch using the win7 loader.
here is the partition scheme on my 500gb sata drive :
/dev/sda1      /boot                 250mb    (primary)
/dev/sda2      windows 7 ntfs   100gb     (primary)
/dev/sda3      swap                  4gb        (primary)
/dev/sda5     /                       16gb        (logical)
/dev/sda6     /var                   8gb         (logical)
/dev/sda7     /home               the rest of the hd space   (logical)
What am I doing wrong and how do i prevent the boot flag from changing?
Thanks in advance for any help you can give me!
Last edited by kamigr (2010-01-12 14:35:07)

naequs wrote:
bumping this because i have the EXACT same problem !
however i installed grub to sda1 because i didnt want my installs to mess with each other  (not that ive had any problems with grub in mbr though...) .
this just looked cleaner to me.
if anyone has figured out how to prevent windows from automagically changing the bootgflag, id like to know !
but maybe this is a question more suitable for a windoze forum
tia
/edit: seriously, ive been searching the net for some time now, including irc chans and there seems to be no solution to this ! all threads similar to this just end dead !
i hate how windows claims to own my computer!
1. don't necrobump
2. as mentioned in the thread, just install grub to mbr and chainload windows. It works just fine and is the easiest way to get it working reliable.

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