Long ago I learned the folly of trying to have a Microsoft operating system [other than DOS] share a hard drive partition with anything else. Now, so have you, it is a valuable lesson. (This is not me being high and mighty, I’m glad it worked out, Spin Rite has saved me once also - long time ago)
I have NEVER seen a partition share work for any length of time, other than 1 exception. BeOS could do it, and it never gave me problems.

I am not familiar with the model of your laptop, but I would suggest investing in another 2.5″ hard drive, and an external enclosure. The 2.5″ enclosures are USB powered, and cheap! Then set up your flavor of Linux on it, and set the laptop to boot from USB. That way Vista, which is a pig, in more ways than 1 (it doesn’t like anything sharing the machine) doesn’t have to know about it - and any nastiness such as you report can be avoided.

Also, there have been reports of troubles with 7.04 - I’ve never experienced them, but I’d either try 6.06, which is rock solid, or give Fedora 7 or OpenSuSE 10.2 a try. They are both very nice, and trouble free.

Have a good day - nice to see it turnd out well. May I suggest keeping the new drive just long enough to try what I suggested - that way you don’t get stuck with a hard drive if you don’t like the results. The 2.5″ case can be had for $10, which is cheap enough to try it out.

The lesson of sharing a drive with another OS is an old one indeed. I remember trying it with a BBS server some time back, and realizing the sting of having to format and reinstall back when floppies were actually…floppy.

Sadly, it would appear we have not come a long way since then. Windows is still not playing nice with others.

Funny thing,cynic that i am, i expected similar terrible stuff that prof Matt had when Wubi was d/loaded on 3 laptops:
a five+ yr old Toshiba A1110,a 6mos ToshP100& a 3yr R3000Compaq.
All had XP Home& Ubi works great!
The only problem was my mistake of using Automatix wch screwed up pkg installs& disabled Updates.
Fast forward Six months& Tosh1 and T2 are XP-free, while the CP is still happily humming along with Wubi&XP is used just for AV and antimalware updates& a XP-only program.

Methinks *Vista* ain’t playing nice with Others.

This could be the case. Keeping in mind that HP Latops are partitioned and re-written by their restore DVD and any virtual partitions in an unknown format can cause some serious problems with the process. There may be a lot of people with the same laptop I have that have Wubi installed with no difficulties.

As stated in the article, Wubi s a great idea. It is infact an excellent idea that I hope gains not only international attention, but convinces people to take a step towards the open source community. The concern is more than anything the fact that a BETA program of any kind is being advertised as being completely safe. Windows isn’t even advertised as being completely safe, though it is touted as being more secure. It’s concerning to me that inexperienced users will take a blind leap of faith in any BETA program without performing the necessary backups assuming that Wubi is as safe as it is said to be.

If it hadn’t have corrupted my hard drive to the point where it failed a bios-level diagnostic, I’d probably have written an extremely positive review about it.

My experience has been similar to ‘dar’ - Wubi and WinXP don’t appear to have any issues on 4 machines.
Wubi and Vista Ultimate resulted in another screwed up HP, but again SpinRite recovered the drive.
After lots of cussing and false starts with trying to get either WinXP or Vista working with Ubuntu, that HP finally got going properly with 7.04 as the sole desktop OS.
May have worked with GRUB but by then the owner (who was working on it in my shop) was so mad at Microsoft I wasn’t about to suggest trying yet another circus.

About Linux. I have Ubuntu installed on my Asus computer but on a seperate drive.. No problems with it because I don’t know enough to get into trouble. YET! My biggest bug-a-boo is until Linux becomes as easy to download, install and run programs such as Windows does, it won’t be a great player in the OS contest. Yes I now its a great OS, but I just am having problems running programs. Once installed everything works super but, and I am not a slow learner, just at my age and physical conditon I cannot retain information sometimes, until its installed, I am still reading and learning how to do things. So I am glad you wrote about WUBI, I have it downloaded but will not use this beta version for installation on another computer.. Oh, my first computer was a Timex Sinclair ts1000, remember them? 1K of memory. It worked well.
thank you.
jr maxwell
billings, montana

You know, I never had a problem with DOS. It was a solid OS. I miss DOS.

After thinking about Linux for a long while, I decided to give Wubi a try. It worked 99% (to be honest, I did have a glitch, and I went to the Linux Ubuntu forums and had an answer in 15 minutes) but certainly I was smart enough to put it on its own disk drive.

I played with it for 2 weeks, and now I am running full Ubuntu. Looks nice, and very stable, but getting drivers running properly for my nVidia card took several visits to the Ubuntu forums. But you get help there.

(I guess I should be honest, I still have Windows on the other PC)

Hello, I have exactly the same problem that Matt Ryan had. Ditto. The problem began after I removed Wubi. Do you have a solution without spending $100. I would be very interested. Thanks

I found a friend with Spinrite and convinced them to come over with it. You might find some good utilities out there, but honestly, there is no substitute for the best. Spinrite is the best out there, hands down.

To: the Oracle

Thanks for your advice, but..

You say:
The 2.5″ enclosures are USB powered, and cheap! Then set up your flavor of Linux on it, and set the laptop to boot from USB.

Yet GRUB takes over and wants to install on the Windows HD. You can’t get it to boot and run from the USB without knowing a lot more than I do about how to set its init file. Can you give some tips on how to do this? Or turn Chris loose to do a video on it?

Carls

Hi,
Installed WUBI through WinXP desktop PC with Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn on separate drive. Works just fine for now; true test will come with final release of Gutsy Gibon and attempts at upgrading
Would have serious reservations about installing Ubuntu via WUBI on the same Windows drive, especially if I were running Vista.

[…] Trying to install Ubuntu, but lack the know-how? Try Wubi! Posted on October 6, 2007 by Raphy Update: Install at your own risk. Read more about it.  […]

greatings…

great post…

A 64 bit multitasking DOS would be great

Anyways, it is not a case of Windows not playing nice.

Windows was on the drive first.

Wubi/Ubuntu came along second. It was up to wubi/ubuntu not to mess things up, or at least not leave a mess behind.

How the heck is Windows supposed to cooperate with god knows what coming after it without any prior knowledge of what it is going to be?

On the other hand, Wubi/Ubuntu is specifically designed to be an overlay on top of the host operating system, therefore, it has the responsibility for compatibility and housekeeping.