Matthew Edlefsen on 9 Jan 2010 22:36:43 -0800


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[PLUG] Story and warning about wubi and ubuntu


Just wanted to possibly save some of you out t here with possibly
hours of headaches.

I've been visiting my family this week and my sister was home from
college as well.  She has a brand new laptop running vista that was
having a whole host of problems.  Having just read about wubi (
http://wubi-installer.org/ ), I thought this would be a good chance to
evangelize linux a bit in a completely reversible way (you can
uninstall wubi at any time and go back to windows only).

After installing it and enjoying a week of problem free, not to
mention faster and sleeker, computing I installed the latest kernel
update and upon reboot found myself staring at a grub prompt.  After 2
hours of bizarre grub errors and kernel panics while frantically
scrounging around bug reports I found that this was a bug in the
*beta* version of grub2 that is being installed by default on all new
ubuntu installs.  The bug in question has to do with the grub2 ntfs
module not being able to read past 4gb.

Anyways, the fix that worked for me can be found here:
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/477104/comments/90

To apply just download it and copy it to /host

If you've already hit the "staring at a grub prompt" stage you can
follow these instructions to boot (ignore the bit about update-grub2):
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/477104/comments/76

If any of you have wubi installs or know of people with wubi installs
you may want to check this out before anybody else encouters this and
decides linux isn't worth the trouble.

-Matt Edlefsen
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