Comment 22 for bug 613288

I suspect the common denominator is that this is specific to Windows 7
and that it be a clean/new machine without any previous installs.

I also encountered a very similar problem with a brand new cpu from hp.

One thing to note is the typical partitioning scheme these days makes it very difficult/impossible to install a multiboot system. I would not be surprised if this is intentional.

Windows 7 typically comes as
p1: small, hidden boot utility
p2: large, most of disk, the Win7
p3: 10 gigs, recovery-reinstaller

Since windows has historically not functioned if you try to rearrange the partition numbers, attempting to split partition #2 into two partitions is likely to break the ability to run the recovery from partition #3.

It should be possible to resize #2 and then move #3 closer, thus freeing up disk at the end for ubuntu while preserving the partition sequence for windows compatibility. but the current install software does not support this -- thus the increasing desire to be able to use wubi.

On the hp that I attempted to install wubi on, everything appeared to go well, no error messages. but when booting the computer it failed to be able to load/find ubuntu. It was still able to boot win7. since it was using the microsoft boot loader instead of grub, and since microsoft appears to have totally changed how their boot loader config works in windows 7, I was not able to discern much about what was going on, I did not find a boot.ini file. I also didn't see a way to remove the failed wubi install.

I didn't have a lot of time to spend on this, so I finally erased win7 and did a full install of ubuntu 10.0.4