Wubi

11.10 no boot after system updates

Asked by Joshua Giles

I have a 64-bit installation of Wubi with Ubuntu 11.10 on a system with Windows 7. After initial installation, it worked beautifully. After several successful boots and ~36 hours, the update manager told me I had 370 updates to install, including security updates and distribution updates. Then, it said I needed to restart in order for the updates to finish.

I clicked "restart" and the system shut down, but I can now no longer boot into Ubuntu. Selecting it from the boot menu takes me directly to the loading screen ("Ubuntu", with the dots under) and it stays there indefinitely. Ctrl-Alt-Delete causes reboot.

Is there any way to get it to boot, even if only into some sort of safe mode? My primary objective at this point is to recover files that I had saved within the Ubuntu filesystem - any way to read the FS off of the root.disk file would do the trick.

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Answered
For:
Wubi Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
bcbc (bcbc) said : 		#1

This tool can read the root.disk from Windows: http://ext2read.blogspot.com/

After recovering your data you could also try running 'chkdsk /f' and then if required running fsck on the root.disk ( https://wiki.ubuntu.com/WubiGuide#How_can_I_access_my_Wubi_install_and_repair_my_install_if_it_won.27t_boot.3F )
- since your problem may be due to file system corruption.

You could also try booting with some different kernel boot options: press 'E' to edit the boot entry (from the grub menu) and remove 'quiet splash' and add 'nomodeset'. Then Ctrl+X to boot. This should give you an idea where it is hanging up.

So it would look something like this (just look at the end starting with 'ro') :
linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-15-generic root=UUID=18B4B7BBB4B799A8 loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro nomodeset

Can you help with this problem?

Provide an answer of your own, or ask Joshua Giles for more information if necessary.

To post a message you must log in.