Wubi boot issues a thing of the past

With the release of the third update of Lucid Lynx (10.04.3) last week, this finally puts to bed the problems with Wubi and Grub2 (Ubuntu's bootloader) that resulted in many Wubi boot failures. The issue that allowed the user to overwrite the Windows bootloader is also taken care of.

These issues were fixed prior to the release of Natty Narwhal earlier this year, however, the patches to the active stable releases (Lucid and Maverick) were only released as an Update in June, and finally in 10.04.3 last week.

This was certainly a big problem that has plagued Wubi users for over a year; longer if you include the problem in 9.10 Karmic Koala. It kept many on ubuntuforums.org busy and led to the successful Wubi megathread (thanks to Rubi1200 for that).

I have been quite critical of Canonical and the developers on this blog for not addressing this sooner (this problem was probably the driving force behind the blog in the first place), however, I think it's true that my focus is quite narrow and the developers have many issues to deal with, and Wubi wasn't always on the top of that list.

It appears that now there is a strong development effort to improve Wubi for 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot - which I'll write about later. So far, I've been running a development Oneiric Ocelot Wubi install from early on in the development cycle without any issues.

One thing seems certain - Wubi is popular as ever with new users and a great tool to introduce Windows users to Ubuntu.

How to migrate - in pictures

Update: this post is now out of date. Please refer to this instead: How to migrate updated for release 12.04

Installing Wubi - common problems

Since the release of Natty Narwhal 11.04 a few days ago, I've been monitoring various support forums looking for issues. The good news is that I'm not seeing anything new and exciting, just the standard problems users have with installs. So that's good, but I realised that now is probably a good time to catalogue some of these common problems - and their solutions (if they exist).

Preamble
Wubi installs involve two distinct processes. First the Windows install where you select the user name and password, the target drive, and the size of the install. Wubi then finds a local desktop CD image or downloads one, creates virtual disks, modifies the Windows boot manager, sets up a special file with installation instructions and tells you to reboot.
The second part is when you reboot and select Ubuntu from the Windows boot manager. This boots a linux kernel (through grub4dos and grub2), and then runs the standard Ubuntu installer (Ubiquity), which uses the special installation instructions created in Windows - so that no user interaction is required  (usually).

Important info
If you want an Ubuntu CD/USB: go to http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/download (step 2, click on medium, and then SHOW ME HOW)
You can run wubi from the CD or standalone. If you run it standalone you can download the desktop CD ISO yourself and place it in the same folder as wubi.exe and it will use it (must be the same release).
You cannot install from an alternate ISO or a DVD ISO (burning a CD ISO to DVD is okay). Installing from a USB will fail if the USB partition is > 890MB (and it will copy the entire partition to your hard drive before failing - and that could be an 8GB file, so be careful).

When Wubi fails in Windows you should check the log file or post it on a support forum for help. To find the wubi log file, go to the %temp% folder (enter %temp% in your Windows explorer address bar) and open the file wubi-nn.nn-revnnn.log (n's represent release and wubi.exe revision)

Windows issues

• Failure to download the metalink. Either you don't have internet access or you are installing 11.04 and you select Ubuntu-netbook. I mentioned the 11.04 Netbook problem in my last post, so nothing further to add there. 
• You select to install to a drive that is actually a Dynamic disk. These are Windows specific and it won't let you 'boot from them' - and Ubuntu cannot see or boot from them either (unless they also happen to reside in the MBR partition table - in which case you run the risk of destroying data on dynamic drives that do not).  Solution: DO NOT INSTALL on dynamic drives. Either get rid of them or find an external drive.
• You get a firewall notification asking whether to allow "pyrun.exe". This is the python executable that is actually running Wubi - and it is uses a bittorrent downloader to retrieve the desktop CD image. You need to give it access or the install will fail. Alternatively download the desktop CD ISO and place it in the same folder as wubi.exe (and ALSO remove the bad CD or wubi.exe will find it and fail again).
• The CD was not created correctly (a bad burn). If you look in the wubi log it will tell you the md5sum failed or some other error (Errno13, 22). Solution: create a new CD or run wubi.exe standalone.
• It's downloading the wrong version 64bit. It's not actually the wrong version. Wubi defaults to 64bit when the computer is capable (and some users do not know that their computers are 64bit). If you want 32bit then download the 32bit version and a) place it in the same folder as wubi.exe, b) burn it to CD or c) specify the command line option --32bit when running wubi.exe
• IOError: [Errno 22] or [Errno 13]. This error can be associated with a bad burn, bad image, or even an optical drive incompatibility. Most likely a bad burn. You can either boot from the CD and get it to check itself, or remove the CD, and run wubi standalone (with or without the downloaded desktop CD ISO in the same folder). If you are not running from a CD, Errno13 can be associated with a permissions error (run as an administrator) or a corrupted file (run chkdsk).
• Pyrun.exe says "No disk". This looks like a tight loop but it's not. Usually it's caused by a disk 'drive' assigned to an empty drive like a multimedia card reader. Either remove the cardreader or other peripheral or click cancel many times to get through it. To kill the install process open up task manager and kill pyrun.exe.

Please note - if you have an Ubuntu CD (matching the release and flavour of wubi.exe) in a disk drive, Wubi.exe (even if run standalone) will find it and use it. If the CD has a bad checksum or bad burn, it will cause the installation to fail - Wubi.exe might go through the motions of downloading a new CD, but often the first error will be fatal. 

When you reboot from Windows to complete the installation, and select Ubuntu the errors you encounter are related to the Windows boot manager, grub4dos, linux/hardware compatibilites, and the Ubuntu installer (Ubiquity).

Ubuntu/Ubiquity issues

• If you find it boots straight back into Windows, then either Wubi failed to add an entry to the Windows Boot Manager, or the Windows boot manager Timeout is set to 0. In both cases, let it boot, right click on (My) Computer, Properties, Advanced, Startup & Recovery settings... and check the Timeout - make it 15 or more. Check the drop down box to see if the Ubuntu entry is there. NEVER set Ubuntu as default and the Timeout to 0 or 1 or Windows won't boot.
• "Try hd(0,0): xxxx: No wubildr". This is not an error. Ignore it unless it accompanies "grldr not found". See one of my previous posts on this.
• Reboots back to the Windows boot loader or grub> prompt. See the Wubi megathread, problem #2 (This won't happen on an initial install)
• Grub rescue> prompt. See the Wubi megathread, Problem #1. (This won't happen on an initial install).
• If you never get to see the installer, then you are having a problem booting the linux kernel. There could be a number of reasons... graphics card, other device incompatibilities. The best thing to do is search the support forums (e.g. ubuntuforums.org) for your particular computer brand/model and the specific release - often someone else has figured out what you'll need and published it. See here for how to supply boot workarounds.
• You installer starts, but you get the message "no root file system is defined". This is often caused by Ubiquity failing to read the target partition. This message can also occur on a normal install,for a different reason (user error) but with Wubi there is no user interaction to select the target root partition. Some common causes are: you have some leftover GPT partition table data when you're using an MBR partition table; you have some fakeraid metadata but are not using raid, or you're using an unsupported Raid. In all cases, it's best to run the bootinfoscript and create a request for help on the forums to find a solution.
• Other problems. If the installer halts for any reason, you have to collect logs otherwise no one will be able to do anything about it. Drop to terminal (CTRL+ALT+F2) and collect the logs (to \ubuntu\installation\logs.zip): 

sudo sh /host/ubuntu/install/custom-installation/hooks/failure-command.sh

No more Netbook-edition on Natty Narwhall 11.04

Good news for Wubi users - Natty Narwhal 11.04 is out and it is probably the safest Wubi install for some time, mainly due to all the grub2 fixes that came out recently.

There's one gotcha that was missed during development and this is that Wubi, when run standalone, will still give you the choice between Ubuntu and Ubuntu-netbook. However if you choose Ubuntu-netbook you'll get an error message that it couldn't download the metalink.

What's the reason? The netbook-edition in Maverick was basically the same as 32-bit Ubuntu except it included the Unity interface. With 11.04 the newly rebuilt Unity interface is now standard on regular Ubuntu, so there's no need for a separate Netbook-edition.

Wubi Natty will be ready for Beta2

Wubi has seen some major focus from Canonical's developers (Colin Watson) in the past week or so, finding and fixing major bugs including long-standing Grub-related bugs affecting 10.04 Lucid Lynx and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (these releases will see the fixes a little later). But for 11.04 Natty Narwhal, Wubi is looking stable now for Beta2 - or if you're using the current-daily CD images.

This means that both new 11.04 installs as well as upgrades from 10.10 to 11.04 are now working!

PS There's just one innocuous message you'll see before the grub menu is displayed, regarding the prefix not being set.

Natty is natty

In my previous post I mentioned that Natty is now working with Wubi (on the current daily-live image), and also that the new Unity desktop is now working on my old Dell with an ATI X1300 Radeon (whereas with 10.10 netbook edition and early Natty Alphas, Unity did not work at all).

Since then I've reinstalled a number of times and I'm coming to like Natty and Unity. It feels - well - "natty". Not that that's a word I'd use frequently and I consider it only marginally better than the upcoming Oneiric Ocelot (that must be some good weed over at Canonical).

The only Wubi issues I've found are a couple of boot problems with the latest version of Grub. The first was fixed very quickly, and the second only seems to affect my installs when they're not on the main Windows partition. I've worked around this by manually booting and then editing grub.cfg by hand.  I believe that it's basically the same grub rebooting issue from 10.04 and upgrades to 10.10, but this time there is no workaround - other than changing the  00_header script in /etc/grub.d/ but hopefully this will be resolved before release.

The more people that test and report bugs, the better. So if you decide to try Natty on Wubi, please report any bugs you find in launchpad.net and make it better for newcomers to Ubuntu.

Wubi finally working in Natty Narwhal

I've just tested the latest Wubi.exe available here. It took a while to download the latest daily-live Desktop CD image (in the end I did that myself from here). But after that installing Wubi was painless. Apart from a benign grub2 message, the Ubiquity installer was impressive - looking ready for release - and seemed faster than prior releases, as did booting up for the first time.

Surprisingly Unity even worked on my computer - I'm not totally sold on it and there were some rendering issues, but at least now I have the opportunity to review it, instead of staring at a blank screen.

So - in summary - the installation of Wubi Natty Narwhal worked flawlessly. As always, alpha testing has risks, so take necessary precautions.