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

Ubuntu: Repairing 0 bytes free space

I don't have the idea if it's EXT2/3 file system that makes Ubuntu think that my Ubuntu installation has only 0 bytes remaining space -- but I suspect that it is so.

Asking other average Ubuntu users, they also don't know where the problem really lies. It's probably because they natively installed Ubuntu on large partition -- by the way, this 0 bytes problem are commonly experienced by WUBI users.

But they know the solution: "delete unnecessary files, uninstall unused applications"

And so I did. I deleted about 100MB files yet, it's still saying 0 bytes.

I removed application that I don't usually use and I freed about 350MB of space. And yet, it's still saying 0 bytes.

So where does the problem lie? I really suspect it's how EXT3 work. And after reading an article that "Why doesn't [GNU/]Linux need defragmenting", it's all clear.

For Ubuntu not to be defragmented, it should at least have 5% free space to work on it's non-defragmenting trick. Unlike NTFS that it let's you consume to the last remaining free space -- I think. :D

So what exactly is the solution here? There's actually just two way to repair it.

a. Resize your partition.
b. Delete more files, uninstall more application.

The first one is somewhat risky. I really have a bad feeling about resizing partitions.

The second one is quite absurd. You are looking for more space so you can add more stuff, and keep the old stuff.

But either way, try to free as much as possible. My Ubuntu says I have 250MB free space after removing 600MB -- yeah, I myself is a WUBI user.

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. ;)