Completed my Ubuntu 9.04 copy download early in the morning, took a huge 6 hrs to complete due to no indian mirror. My DVD drive stopped working. Other than virtual disk (Daemon tools ) I had no other way to install it through WUBI. First new thing i noticed was the new loading bar with animated grungy texture stripes. Then the new login screen.

As everyone knows Windows rots with time and it was time to discard my copy now. The part I was worried about was loss of Ubuntu installation, since I installed it using Wubi inside windows. It was then I stumbled (literally) over a way to upgrade the virtual wubi installation to a true ext3 independent partition.

“The Loopmounted Virtual Partition Manager allows users to upgrade their existing Wubi or Lubi installation to a standard Ubuntu system by transferring all data, settings, and applications from the original install to a dedicated partition. The advantages of upgrading using LVPM are better disk performance and reliability, and the ability to replace the original operating system with Ubuntu.” I couldn’t resist trying.

step1: Installed the pre boot partion tool for linux.

step2: restarted, selected partion tool from the boot menu, and resized an NTFS partion by cutting out a 10Gb ext3 partition.

step3: restarted to wubi installation of Ubuntu, downloaded and installed LVPM

step4: Started LVPM and selected trnsfer>>SDA(number) of your ext3 partition.

step5: Watch the show, reboot

the tutorial is well explained here

You do it all right and get an error17 or error15 during the boot. I guess they forgot to mention the menu.lst changing part.

EDITING MENU.LST

to change it go to Wubi installation again. Now perform a test by downloading this script to desktop and copy paste this code to the terminal:

sudo bash ~/Desktop/boot_info_script*.sh

this will produce results.txt in the desktop, now suppose you installed in SDA9 then note down the bold code from results.txt like this:

/dev/sda9: UUID=”09b8370d-d20e-45c1-8951-dfb906bb0e4a” TYPE=”ext3″

now to open the menu.lst and grant permission to change do this

sudo mkdir /media/sda9
sudo mount /dev/sda9 /media/sda9
gksudo gedit /media/sda9/boot/grub/menu.lst

now Change
# groot=()/ubuntu/disks
to
# groot=the number you noted in the above step
change all three occurrences of
root ()/ubuntu/disks
to
uuid the number you noted in the above step
Save the file and reboot.  Hopefully you will now be able to boot into Ubuntu.

This post isn’t copied (people may doubt the pro look of the post), it was painstakingly compiled from different forums and ultimately I could boot into the independent Ubuntu. the various sources of information are linked in the post to give due respect to the place where knowledge originated from.

Purpose of  writing down this experiment was- for my personal future reference and to help ubuntu newbs (like me) to find information at one place regarding transfer of Wubi installation to a ext3 independent partition.