Brief Wubi report

[Dazed_75]

On Dec 10, 2007 10:43 AM, Alan Dayley <alandd at consultpros.com> wrote:
> I have a older notebook computer that we wanted to make useful.  No CD
> drive and will not boot USB.  And the PCMCIA CD drive we have will not
> boot for some reason.  Here is what I did so far:
>
> - Remove the 20GB hard drive.
> - Attach to another host computer.
> - Create one smallish partition as bootable DOS.
> - Copy licensed W2K CD to that smallish partition.  (Windows is needed
> for some people to classify the computer as usable.)
> - Put hard drive back in the notebook.
> - Boot DOS.
> - Run W2K installer from DOS.
> - Install W2K to a second partition created by the W2K installer.
> - All is well with booting W2K.
>
> At this point I figured I'd try out Wubi (http://wubi-installer.org) as
> an easy way to get Linux on the machine.  All went well until the first
> boot into Ubuntu.  The computer hung at one of the install processes.
> After that it would not run the Wubi installer again.
>
> ???
>
> I looked around on the disk.  It appears that Wubi setup the boot
> properties on the first partition (known to W2K as C:) but then put some
> of the other boot settings in the root of the second partition too
> (known to W2K as D:).  The second partition is, in fact, the W2K root
> partition.  My current guess is that Wubi is confused by this two
> partition setup and could not do the configuration correctly.
>
> I'll play with some things over the next few days, like redo the W2K
> installation to the one partition, and see if Wubi will be happy.  I
> just wanted to report this apparent weakness for others to step around.
>
> Alan
>
Which wubi-installer did you use?  They exist for different versions
of ubuntu.  Last I looked the version for ubuntu 7.10 was still in
beta.  I would be suspicious of the ubuntu version as well.  My
experience trying 7.10 on a variety of machines seems to indicate it
does not do as well on older hardware as 7.04 did.

Also, if you used the wubi for 7.10, how much disk space did you
specify?  I believe it really needs at least 4 Gb.  7.04 could get by
with less (3 Gb I think).  More is better though.  Just uninstall wubi
in windows and it should go away if you want to try again.  If you
used the wubi for 7.10 and it does not work, try the one for ubuntu
7.04 instead.