Wubi won't boot: "Try (hd0,0): NTFS5:" (reboots)

[Marius Gedminas]

Sister's laptop, Dell Lattitude something-or-other. 320 GB disk with one NTFS partition. Installed Ubuntu 9.10 with Wubi, upgraded to 10.04. It worked fine until this week, when Ubuntu stopped booting.

Symptoms:
 1. select "Ubuntu" from the XP boot menu
 2. see "Try (hd0,0): NTFS5:" flash very briefly
 3. the laptop instantly reboots

Attempts to press Esc after selecting "Ubuntu" to get into the Grub menu fail: it continues to print the same error and reboots.

chkdsk.exe /r claims the filesystem is clean.

c:\wubildr.mbr exists and has sha1sum acee2824602b6d38c696b152877d12df4fe83e6d.
c:\wubildr exists and has sha1sum 3e3ecbd2c5052b0bca3bf00aa01d37a72681a286.

  (I have at some point replaced the original wubildr, which still resides in c:\ubuntu\winboot, with an updated one that I found attached to a bug in launchpad. That fixed some kind boot issue my sisters laptop had a few months back. I'm sorry I haven't written down which bug it was. This is a different one, with different symptoms.)

c:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk exists.
c:\ubuntu\disks\swap.disk exists.
c:\ubuntu\disks\boot\grub exists, but is an empty folder.
c:\ubuntu\winboot\wubildr exists and has sha1sum 6c7357734991d321178923c67b129be777c1b171.
c:\ubuntu\winboot\wubildr.mbr exists and has sha1sum acee2824602b6d38c696b152877d12df4fe83e6d.
c:\ubuntu\winboot\wubildr.cfg exists and has sha1sum fb6ec5ac85e44fdc36796c3399548ce8c98f70c6.
c:\ubuntu\install exists, and is mostly empty. There's a file named .fuse_hidden0000000400000001 inside with 700 MB of something. file(1) claims it's an ISO 9660 filesystem labeled 'Ubuntu 9.10 i386'.

I can boot GRUB2 from a USB disk, then do a little dance to boot the Ubuntu image from root.disk:
    loopback loop0 (hd1,1)/ubuntu/disks/root.disk
    set root=(loop0)
    linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-27-generic root=/dev/sda1 loop=/ubuntu/disks/root.disk ro quiet splash
    initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-27-generic
    boot

It seems to be that wubildr.mbr boots and then crashes/reboots when it tries to locate wubildr.

Is there a newer version of wubildr + wubildr.mbr that I could try?

Trying to run wubi.exe from an Ubuntu 10.10 live CD asks me to uninstall the existing setup; I don't want to wipe root.img with all my sister's files!

[Marius Gedminas (mgedmin)]

Rebooted a few more times, edited description to fix the error message. The loader says "Try (hd0,0)", which is suspicious, since there's only one partition, and it's (hd0,1). I know that because when I boot grub from a USB disk (and the disks get renumbered by the BIOS), I can't ls (hd1,0) -- nor hd(0,0) for that matter.

[Jason Random (yank-key)]

I am gettin the exact same error. With same identical wubi install.