WUBI: Unable to boot Ubuntu and Windows due to corrupted drive

Are you having problem booting your WUBI installation because the drive seems corrupted?

There could be a solution -- the Ubuntu CD.

No, we are not going to reformat and reinstall everything. Continue reading.

Let's say you installed Ubuntu (WUBI) on your drive C: with drive label, MyDrive.

Step 1. Load Ubuntu CD in your CD-ROM and boot from it.
Step 2. Choose, "Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer" and continue booting.
Step 3. Once Ubuntu has fully loaded, go to Places -> Computer.
Step 4. A window will open and you should be able to find MyDrive (the drive C:) listed among File System, etc.

You are not done yet.

These last steps are crucial.

You need to have another partition with file system readable by Windows -- it should be non-EXT2/3 format.

Via Another Partition:
Step 5. In your MyDrive, copy WUBILDR and WUBILDR.MBR and paste it to the other partition.
Step 6. Shutdown Ubuntu and removethe Ubuntu CD from your CD-ROM.
Step 7: If you are in luck, your Ubuntu should install just fine.

If not, having a bootable external disk could also be handy.

Let's go back to step 5.

Via External Hard Disk:
Step 5. In your MyDrive, copy WUBILDR and WUBILDR.MBR and paste it to the external hard disk.
Step 6. Shutdown Ubuntu and remove the Ubuntu CD from your CD-ROM.
Step 7. Make sure that the external disk is plugged into your computer before booting. If you are in luck, your Ubuntu should install just fine.

If you get your Ubuntu back booting again, my congratulations! But the bad news: Your Windows installation will still be unbootable :D

WUBI - Ubuntu won't boot; missing root.disk

Did this ever happen to you? It sucks right? You simply wished 'you should have installed natively (the old way)'.

So your Ubuntu won't boot because root.disk is missing, then you check out c:\ubuntu\disks, it's not there. (And probably, disks directory is not even accessible or is missing too.) o_O

So what happened? Your NTFS filesytem got corrupted because on many reasons -- primarily, you might had a power interruption.

Is it lost then? I'm not sure but let's hope it didn't. You can try to recover root.disk by following this steps:
1. Run command prompt as Administrator -- needless to say, 'Enter your password'.

2. Run Check Disk by typing: chkdsk c: /f (change C: to your local disk drive)
NOTE: There's a big change that a message will show.
Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process. Would you like to schedule this volume to be checked the next time the system restarts? (Y/N)
Just type Y and restart you PC immediately.

3. After it finished checking (and possibly, repairing) your disk, make sure to show your hidden files.

4. Look for your (onced missing) root.disk under c:\found.000 directory and put it back to c:\ubuntu\disks\.
NOTE: Your swap.disk could also be inside found.000.

Now, try to reboot your Windows and choose Ubuntu then hope that the recovered file is intact and not corrupted. ;)