ubuntu 10.04 won't boot after updates (wubi)

Doesn't sound good...

When you reach the menu, can you select Ubuntu, but instead of pressing enter, press "e", it should display a line with all the boot parameters. You can use your keyboard to modify those settings. If you go to the end of this line, you should see "quiet splash". Delete those two words, and press "b". It will show you much more info about your boot, and maybe you can see what's wrong.

I'm not 100% sure this will work, as I'm not familiar with wubi, but that's worth a try, because otherwise, we are a bit left with nothing to work on :)

It seems Grub launched itself.
Can you boot on Ubuntu Live CD, choose option "Try but don't install", Applications->Accessories->Terminal, mount hard drive and post file /<mount point>/boot/grub/grub.cfg. Please, don't post whole file, which would make forum unreadable but only the half-dozen of lines about Linux image (If I remember, should be in section #30).

I don't know whether I've done this right or not, I am a newbie when it comes to command line stuff, but fdisk -l gives information that HDD is /dev/sda1
So then I did:
sudo mkdir /media/sda1
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1
sudo gedit /media/sda1/boot/grub/grub.cfg

grub.cfg is empty

Please let me know if I got the commands wrong and I'll try again

I seems Grub works differently between dual boot and Wubi, and I will not be able to help you. Sorry.

Thanks François, but "e" does nothing in Wubi, the only key that works is "Enter" and that just sends you round the loop already mentioned.

Sorry you couldn't help delance.

Can anyone else help? There are some important files on that machine which haven't been backed up (my wife is not very good at backing up) so I really don't want to do a re-install.

Hello Bob

It's possible to read the Wubi partition from a LiveCD. Then you can copy/paste everything on a removable harddrive for instance.

sudo mkdir /media/win
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/win
(it gives access to your windows partition)

sudo mkdir /media/vdisk
sudo mount -o loop /media/win/ubuntu/disks/root.disk /media/vdisk
(it mounts the ubuntu partition which is INSIDE your windows partition)

Then you can access your Wubi files from /media/vdisk

And my 2 cents on this: Wubi is nice to test. Only to test. I woud not trust it too much: it's Ubuntu inside Windows, so if the Windows partition has a problem, your Wubi Ubuntu could be gone. It's also slower, more complicated to fix (as you can see now :).

A real install would not touch the Windows partition and use maybe 10Gb on your harddrive. I would always choose this solution for a dualboot.

Hello François,

Thanks for your advice, I was coming to the same conclusion!

I built her previous machine as a true dual boot machine with 2 hard drives, but when it came time for a new machine for her and 9.10 came out with the opportunity to dual boot using Wubi it seemed like a good idea. However considering the number of problems we have had both with 9.10 and 10.04 running inside Windows I am going to abandon it and go back to a true dual boot one.

I'll get her files off as you suggested, put another drive in and do a clean install.