Sunday, December 6, 2009

Wubi Upgrade of death [solved] System towing!

So, today I booted up mu computer (in Linux)
and saw some updates were available, the newest version of chrome, some security stuff, and a new kernel!

so I downloaded the updates, and it said i needed to reboot, so I finished my work, then rebooted.

Instead of Grub menu, I was dumped into a Grub prompt. I attempted to reboot, still nothing.

So I searched the web, found man "quick fixes."

Run "chkdsk"in windows, Defrag your hard drive, mount your drive from a live cd and check the file system, And I tried all of them, but nothing worked.

so I found some instructions on how to boot from grub, but this sent me to busy box. (I have no idea how to use that.

I was out of options, I would have to start over, Find all the drivers and software all over again.
But then I thought, maybe if I reinstall and replace the new hardrive image (C:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk) with my old one, I could boot it...

So I moved my harddrive file (C:\ubuntu\disks\root.disk) out of the folder, When you reinstall wubi, all the data inside (C:\Ubuntu) is deleted, so I moved the file to (C:\dell) (CuT not COPY it's way faster) next I ran the wubi installer, (uninstaller was brought up since it was already installed, after that the installer came up) and made a new installation with the smallest possible Capacity, Waited for the install, then rebooted and selected "Xubuntu" , waited for the install to complete, then booted back to windows,
Renamed my old HardDrive to "root2.disk", and copied it back to (C:\ubuntu\disks\);
I then edited (C:\ubuntu\winboot\wubildr.cfg) {make a backup first}
and changed every mention of "root.disk" to "root2.disk"
DO NOT DELETE THE NEW ROOT.DISK!!!!
As it is needed to boot the old one.
save your changes and reboot.
in the Grub menu press 'E' (on the 1st linux entry)
and again change all references of "root.disk" to Root2.disk

CTRL + X to boot this;

and BAM!!!! back to Linux!!!
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
What just happened???
-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_--

I like to call this "SYSTEM TOWING"

We installed a NEW virtual hard drive that works great,
At the boot menu of the New harddrive, we told it "instead of opening, "root.disk" (new hardrive), open "root2.disk" (Old drive).

that's it, it just sounds hard, However, next time you boot linux, it would "normal" boot the new disk again, so we are going to make a menu entry, to allow us to boot our old disk when ever we want!

To do this we must edit our Grub file as ROOT; here is one way to do this:

Sudo mousepad /boot/grub/grub.cfg

You must do this on your NEW hard drive!

to add a new menu entry for OLD drive, copy+paste this:

menuentry "Ubuntu" {
insmod ntfs
set root=(hd0,3)
search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 2c6edb496edb0b0a
loopback loop0 /ubuntu/disks/root2.disk
set root=(loop0)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.31-14-generic root=/dev/sda3 loop=/ubuntu/disks/root2.disk ro quiet splash
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.31-14-generic
}

right under:
### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_lupin ###

It's worked for me, hopefully it will work for you to!!

FAQ.

Q. can't I just Replace "root.disk" with my old one?
A. no, we are towing with the NEW disk, if you kill it, you will be right back where you started.

Q.my WiFi Drivers are GONE!!!!
A. towing sometimes disables incompatible drivers, just re-enable them from "Hardware Drivers"

Q. can I tow from a different Hardrive.
A. Depends on the setup, Read up on Grub, and booting from external drives

Have a question?
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