Now to make sure I don't mess up again, how do I go about triple booting by adding Linux without formatting any of my current partitions. Searching around, some people said that you should create the partitions through my windows side and then install Linux normally. Will this work if I create two partitions off of windows? One for swap and one for normal?
As someone who has done this a lot, you are in for one serious rabbit hole of pain. You will almost certainly mess it up again. You will need to learn about MBR and GPT, and about how Apple hardware boots in EFI mode and CSM-BIOS mode. You're almost certainly better off CSM-BIOS booting Linux, just as with Windows. Or you're asking for even more pain dealing with drivers when booted via EFI. In my case, I get VBIOS corruption on 2008 and 2011 MBPs when EFI booting Linux, so I've resigned to using CSM-BIOS booting.
The other complicating factor is that of boot loaders. CSM-BIOS booting depends on loading code in the first 440 bytes of the MBR and then chain loading the rest of the boot loader. Windows has its own boot loader. Linux has its own boot loader. They don't co-exist, although the GRUB boot loader will chain load the rest of the Windows boot loaders.
Basically, you're asking a question about how to drive oxen to San Francisco. There are a lot of ways to do this. There isn't necessarily one correct way to do it. But there are lots of wrong ways to do it.
I've found gdisk to be invaluable in editing GPTs. And it also will help create hybrid MBRs. For triple boot, you will have to use more partitions than there are available in the MBR, which can only have four. One, the first one, must be an 0xEE entry, leaving you three.
My strategy is to partition such that Mac OS is first, Linux second, and Windows last. So if the GPT is something like
1. EFI System
2. Mac HD
3. Recovery HD [Lion only]
4. BIOS Boot [used by GRUB2 on GPT disks]
5. Linux /boot
6. Linux LVM
7. Windows
What I do is use gdisk to add only the 7th GPT partition into the 2nd MBR slot. I let it add GPT partitions 1 through 6 into the MBR first entry as type 0xEE "protective".
1. 0xEE Protective
2. HFPS/NTFS "Windows"
And I mark the boot flag (active flag) on MBR partition 2.
So basically every GPT partition entry that an MBR tool, including Windows, should never touch, I stuff into the protective MBR partition. I only expose the Windows partition in the MBR. So the Windows installer will definitely not touch any sectors reserved in MBR entry 0xEE, only the 2nd entry which are the sectors for Windows.
