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Hello Michael,

Try to go back to XP, burn Ubuntu iso onto CD, boot from it and see if Live Ubuntu will work for you? If not, what are the errors you seen when loading Ubuntu Live CD?

 suggest you to install Ubuntu NOT using Wubi.

If you have installed Ubuntu via Wubi please uninstall it read
http://wubi-installer.org/faq.php and https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide

Installing Ubuntu using Wubi make Ubuntu less robust and all problems that you will have to Windows can be affect your Ubuntu partition file.

Please note that install Ubuntu using Wubi isn't the best you can do, nothing wrong, but installing a secure operative system Ubuntu into an
unsecure operative system using Wubi is not the better choice you can do: problems that come in Windows might be damage your Ubuntu
installation.

Wubi does not install Ubuntu directly to its own partition.
Wubi install Ubuntu into a big file as an image file on the NTFS partition.

So you are free to try Ubuntu in this way but if you want perform a
regular Ubuntu dual boot mode installation, to have Ubuntu partitions
isolated from Windows partitions: please made a new question.

Here more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wubi_(Ubuntu_installer)

I strongly suggest you to install Ubuntu+Windows in dual mode creating a real Ubuntu ext3 or ext4 partition.
In this mode you can use Ubuntu and Windows ad usual and then using installed Ubuntu you can save or repair damaged (due viruses or other issue) Windows partitions data.

- Here the steps to install Ubuntu 10.04 https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GraphicalInstall
- Here a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaqaDZZ_P0g&feature=fvw

Is very easy to install, if you need info please ask.

Welcome to Ubuntu

Thank you

Marco:
This is an excellent summary. I ran into just this issue, and on researching it here and elsewhere I found the things you say about Wubi to be the case. The Wubi install is very easy. It is silent. For the most part everything autocompletes. But yes, it, or something it contributes to, can cause a problem with booting the computer, in my case, after Ubuntu offered auto updates. This was un-recoverable, so I eventually just did an install from the iso image, as you suggest above, and told it to delete and use the entire disk.

My problems focused around booting. After powerup, when the computer was running through its list of PCI connections, this process terminated early, and it changed to "Boot From CD ROM:" If the CD was in the drive, it rolled the CD. If not, it returned a "No Device Found error, and terminated the boot. The last thing in the PCI device report was ACPI, and this line was not displayed completely. Many sources recommend adding "noapci" in the bootloader file. This may help, but as my computer would not boot, I found it hard to edit that line. Some skill with using a live CD to edit files in the install will be valuable, and I intend to learn them. On the other hand, Wubi may have modified the MBR of my Win7 install, and in that case some of my helpers have suggested that the answer is to run FIXMBR using the Windows rescue disk.

There seem to be a number of people who fall into this problem, and the traffic I have found focuses on ACPI, Wubi, Ubuntu 10.4, and, again, the upgrades that are offered after you are running, which was the beginning of my problem. If Cannonical intends 10.4 to exploit the gap caused by the release of Windows Vista, then it must not be this easy to blow up a working machine.

Thank you, All.

Marco:
This is an excellent summary. I ran into just this issue, and on researching it here and elsewhere I found the things you say about Wubi to be the case. The Wubi install is very easy. It is silent. For the most part everything autocompletes. But yes, it, or something it contributes to, can cause a problem with booting the computer, in my case, after Ubuntu offered auto updates. This was un-recoverable, so I eventually just did an install from the iso image, as you suggest above, and told it to delete and use the entire disk.

My problems focused around booting. After powerup, when the computer was running through its list of PCI connections, this process terminated early, and it changed to "Boot From CD ROM:" If the CD was in the drive, it rolled the CD. If not, it returned a "No Device Found error, and terminated the boot. The last thing in the PCI device report was ACPI, and this line was not displayed completely. Many sources recommend adding "noapci" in the bootloader file. This may help, but as my computer would not boot, I found it hard to edit that line. Some skill with using a live CD to edit files in the install will be valuable, and I intend to learn them. On the other hand, Wubi may have modified the MBR of my Win7 install, and in that case some of my helpers have suggested that the answer is to run FIXMBR using the Windows rescue disk.

There seem to be a number of people who fall into this problem, and the traffic I have found focuses on ACPI, Wubi, Ubuntu 10.4, and, again, the upgrades that are offered after you are running, which was the beginning of my problem. If Cannonical intends 10.4 to exploit the gap caused by the release of Windows Vista, then it must not be this easy to blow up a working machine.

Thank you, All.

Please tell:

1) do you have a md5sum iso verified burned image to a cd to boot your pc from ?
2) if yes press shift at boot when you see the bottom icon with a man inside a circle
3) select the language the press F6 and select acpi=off then press enter
4) select "try Ubuntu without installing"
5) if all is almost working then you can install Ubuntu by pressing to the install icon on the desktop
6) after install Ubuntu then may be you can dress some boot option to pass the acpi=off to the kernel

Please refer here...

better...

1) do you have a md5sum iso verified burned image to a cd to boot your pc from ?
2) if the answer is yes, please boot your pc from the self made cd
3) press shift or space at boot when you see the bottom icon with a man inside a circle
4) select the language then press F6 and select acpi=off then press enter
5) select "try Ubuntu without installing"
6) if all is almost working then you can install Ubuntu by pressing to the install icon on the desktop
7) after install Ubuntu then may be you can dress some boot option to pass the acpi=off to the kernel

Please refer here...

Thanks marcobra (Marco Braida), that solved my question.

While the user seems to think the question is solved, I have to ask, how is this solved by Marco Braida? The answer he gave totally ignored the issue and he simply recommended reinstalling without Wubi?

So next time a user can't boot their Ubuntu - with all their programs, customizations, and data - someone can just say - that method of installing isn't ideal, so just reinstall - and this is considered a solution? Ridiculous. He didn't even make a suggestion to recover the data!

Just because a user uses Wubi - which last time I checked is fully supported by Canonical - doesn't mean that the answer to every problem is "Don't use Wubi". I appreciate that not everyone likes Wubi, but if that's the case, why do you feel the need to 'answer' wubi questions - especially if you have nothing meaningful to contribute.

WUBI did not work for me. In fact, it hosed up a drive, which I had backed up before hand, and only lost some bookmarks (which I miss). Whether I hosed myself with WUBI because I am at fault, or there is a problem with WUBI, I really can't say. I needed the system for a project, and the fresh install on a clean drive worked. I just unplugged my second drive and went ahead as if the Win7 drive was the only one in the machine, and I overwrote it with the Live CD install.

I thought I followed the documentation closely, but basically it was "push this, select that--see how easy?" I thought WUBI was designed to make it easy to sample the joys of Linux without a painful install. If I had lost a ton of data, I would not be impressed with Ubuntu at all right now.

If someone can suggest data recovery methods so I can have them at hand when I try this again sometime, I'm all ears.

Rick

I guess this proves my point (at the least a suggestion for data recovery would have been useful). If you followed Marco's advice to uninstall Wubi, then the virtual disk (root.disk) will have been deleted and recovery is not possible (perhaps with some recovery software but unlikely).

The https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide shows how you can loop mount the virtual disk and recover all your data. e.g. boot from a live CD, mount your windows partition containing the root.disk under /media/win, then you can mount your root.disk as follows:
sudo mount -o loop /media/win/ubuntu/disks/root.disk /mnt
Then you can copy off all your data and settings from /mnt e.g. /mnt/home/

It is also possible to migrate a wubi install direct to partition without losing any customizations and data. The wubi guides's script is outdated and no longer works, but you can use this howto to migrate a wubi install from 9.10 or 10.04: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1519354

Wubi is not for everyone, but it is extremely useful for many new Ubuntu users. And if everytime there is a bug, the solution is 'just reinstall' this doesn't help anyone. Identify the bug, report it, fix it. That's the correct approach.