Discussion - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MigrateWubi

[bcbc]

Steve, I don't have much experience with Macs. Obviously Grub isn't working 'by default' as it should, so I would proceed cautiously - doing some research about dual booting first. The Wubi-move script relies on the expertise of Grub itself and doesn't attempt to 'figure out what to do' since Grub has many experts working on it that know better than me, so I'd be nervous about manually taking control of installing Grub without knowing what you are doing.

In the meantime there shouldn't be any harm running "sudo update-grub" on the Wubi install and then booting the migrated install (which will appear on the bottom of the Grub menu), since it is all copied over and the /etc/fstab should be setup correctly. Then once you figure out what to do, you can install Grub while booted from the migrated install.

Hope that helps

[Mephisto Pheles]

In trying to install/move my xubuntu 12.04.3 LTS wubi I ran into some problems.

The script crashed my desktop in a pretty bad way when I wanted to run it via my XFCE shell...
my display was displaying "snow" nothing else.. fortunately nothing bad happened.
I made sure there was no more drive activity and had to do a hard reset.
I tried again later with the same result.
Don't know if this is related to XFCE, or Xorg or my nvidia drivers or whatever else (kernel 3.8?).
Maybe test it yourself.

I finally managed to move it using ctrl+alt+F1on the xubuntu login screen, and working from that shell.
Maybe a good idea to add this to your instructions; drop to the root shell and excute it from there.

Also.. add using gparted to prepare the partitions - obvious to all but newbies,
but those are very likely the ones who used wubi to start with.

Thanks for the script.

mephisto

[bcbc]

mephisto,

Thanks for the feedback. I'll investigate the problem you reported.

PS I've avoided giving partitioning advice, because that's something that you can find outside of the Wubi-specific migration. But I'll add a link to https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowtoPartition

[Mephisto Pheles]

you're welcome, I'm grateful for the script. Doing something back by giving some feedback is the least I can do.

Given the fact that one has to use a shell anyway, I suppose - after my own "psychedelic" experience, and it sure was that, the very weird display I got there - that it's safer to use a shell not affected by any window/desktop manager. Just in case.

- mephisto

[bcbc]

you're welcome, I'm grateful for the script. Doing something back by giving some feedback is the least I can do.

Given the fact that one has to use a shell anyway, I suppose - after my own "psychedelic" experience, and it sure was that, the very weird display I got there - that it's safer to use a shell not affected by any window/desktop manager. Just in case.

- mephisto

I confess, I am a little puzzled as to what could have happened. The script doesn't change anything on the local system except it does create some udev rules to prevent a problem in 12.04 that results in a Nautilus window popping up when partitions are mounted. This causes problems with the script (because it cannot unmount the partitions while Nautilus is presenting the window) as well as being visually confusing. I can't recall now whether other file managers respond to this in the same way... e.g. Thunar. Everything else the script does is fairly basic terminal commands (formatting, copying, chroot) - there are no graphical popups/messages etc.

It's certainly okay to run it from a non-graphical virtual terminal, but shouldn't be necessary. I'd like to avoid root shells as well - generally dangerous and again unnecessary.

Anyway - I'll install 12.04 Xubuntu with Wubi and try it. As long as it's not something hardware-specific to your machine I should be able to figure it out. We shall see.

[bcbc]

mephisto,

I went to write up an issue on Github and found this: https://github.com/bcbc/Wubi-move/issues/21 (which I had forgotten about). It sounds the same as what happened to you, so I think your issue probably is also a udev bug. I updated a 12.04 (Ubuntu) install I had to 12.04.3 and reran the migration to make sure it's not something incompatible between the script and 12.04.3 and it works fine. I also confirmed that it still needs the udev rule or else it pops up nautilus (so I am reluctant to remove it).

I wonder if you can run:

sudo udevadm trigger

and see what happens (it should do nothing since the rules won't have changed - it will just reapply existing rules). If it hangs up, try Alt+SysRq REISUB before hard-powering off. Or better, check your logs from the time you ran the migration to see if you had the same issue. Then reporting it as a udevadm bug would probably be best. I can add a Known Issue to the migration page to caution about this, but it's difficult for me to fix via the script without knowing the cause and having some other workaround to prevent Nautilus windows popping up.

I'm still going to load up a Xubuntu install and play around some more...

PS the wubi migration script writes entries to syslog, so grep'ing /var/log/ for wubi-move will steer you to the right place

[cello75]

Well I am sorry for the inconveniance but I have made a 'special case': Before I tried to migrate my wubi-installation from /dev/sda3 with its mountpoint /media/UBUNTU I managed somehow (...) to copy my home folder from inside wubi-rootdisk to /dev/sda4. I now would like to migrate from above named directories to /dev/sd4 (second partition-in-line on second s-sata-harddrive) and swap to /dev/sdb3 (now after creating and formatting as ext4 partition /dev/sdb4 FOURTH partition-in-line.... ). BUT the move.sh gives out after typing:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~/wubi-move-2.4$ sudo bash wubi-move.sh --root-disk=/media/UBUNTU/ubuntu/disks/root.disk --homedev=dev/sda4 /dev/sdb4 /dev/sdb3

the following strange comment (not findable on internet):

wubi-move.sh: Validating migration source...
wubi-move.sh: Root disk (/media/UBUNTU/ubuntu/disks/root.disk) missing required directories.
wubi-move.sh: If the original release was prior to 9.10 then it can
wubi-move.sh: not be migrated from the root.disk.
wubi-move.sh: Validation of migration source failed



Please, WHAT is: "missing required directories"??? .... in my ubuntu folder on /media/UBUNTU/ there are 3 folders named: disks - install - winboot (in this order) ----> maybe I have to edit move.sh (with gedit, by the way?)



Thank you in advance for reading
BY THE WAY:

my rootdisk is about 31 GB in size and my new ext4 partition 32 GB - and my content of 'disks' is the folder 'boot' and the files: rootdisk and swap. In the 'boot'-folder there is only a folder named 'grub' with nothing inside..

[bcbc]

Well I am sorry for the inconveniance but I have made a 'special case': Before I tried to migrate my wubi-installation from /dev/sda3 with its mountpoint /media/UBUNTU I managed somehow (...) to copy my home folder from inside wubi-rootdisk to /dev/sda4. I now would like to migrate from above named directories to /dev/sd4 (second partition-in-line on second s-sata-harddrive) and swap to /dev/sdb3 (now after creating and formatting as ext4 partition /dev/sdb4 FOURTH partition-in-line.... ). BUT the move.sh gives out after typing:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~/wubi-move-2.4$ sudo bash wubi-move.sh --root-disk=/media/UBUNTU/ubuntu/disks/root.disk --homedev=dev/sda4 /dev/sdb4 /dev/sdb3

the following strange comment (not findable on internet):

wubi-move.sh: Validating migration source...
wubi-move.sh: Root disk (/media/UBUNTU/ubuntu/disks/root.disk) missing required directories.
wubi-move.sh: If the original release was prior to 9.10 then it can
wubi-move.sh: not be migrated from the root.disk.
wubi-move.sh: Validation of migration source failed



Please, WHAT is: "missing required directories"??? .... in my ubuntu folder on /media/UBUNTU/ there are 3 folders named: disks - install - winboot (in this order) ----> maybe I have to edit move.sh (with gedit, by the way?)



Thank you in advance for reading
BY THE WAY:

my rootdisk is about 31 GB in size and my new ext4 partition 32 GB - and my content of 'disks' is the folder 'boot' and the files: rootdisk and swap. In the 'boot'-folder there is only a folder named 'grub' with nothing inside..

When you migrate from the root.disk, the script checks to make sure that /home and /usr are all present on the root.disk. If not, it tries to mount additional virtual disks to see if it contains these directories. It does this by mounting the root.disk, looking in /etc/fstab and then loading each .disk file it finds. But it has limitations. First, it assumes that the path to the virtual disk in /etc/fstab is /host/ubuntu/disks/, and secondly it expects that the physical virtual disk file is in the same location as the root.disk (i.e. the path specified with --root-disk=)

So, if you have /home mounted from /media/xxx/home.disk then it won't find it; in this case the message you see is "Root disk (<filename>) missing required directories."

The way around this is to migrate from the running Wubi install, which is always the easiest option. Then /home and everything is mounted already. The root.disk migration is generally only required if you're migrating from a backup or you want to migrate over the partition that you had the root.disk on before.

You could probably manually edit the script if you're comfortable doing that. Look in check-source.sh:

# this code goes through each line in /etc/fstab
# and makes sure the virtual disks are not mounted
# and mountable. It assumes that /host/ubuntu/disks/xxx.disk
# means that xxx.disk is in the same location as the current
# root.disk that whose /etc/fstab contains xxx.disk
    while read fDEV fMTPT fTYPE fOPTS fDMP fPASS; do
case "$fMTPT" in
          /home|/usr)
            disks_path=`echo $fDEV | sed -e "s/\(^\/host\/ubuntu\/disks\/\)\(.*\)/\1/"`
            if [ "$disks_path" = "/host/ubuntu/disks/" ]; then
                virtual_disk=`echo $fDEV | sed -e "s/\(^\/host\/ubuntu\/disks\/\)\(.*\)/\2/"`
                if [ ! -f "$rootdiskpath"$virtual_disk ]; then
                   error "Root disk contains a reference to: "$virtual_disk""
                   error "This cannot be found in: "$rootdiskpath""
                   error "Please fix and retry"
                   exit_script 1
                fi
                check_disk_mount "$rootdiskpath"$virtual_disk"\ "
                mkdir -p "$root_mount"$fMTPT
                mount_virtual_disk "$rootdiskpath"$virtual_disk "$root_mount"$fMTPT
            fi
          ;;
        esac
done < "$root_mount"/etc/fstab
}

[cello75]

At first, Thank God I had some time for my little wish to come, Thank you so much for answering. I will exactly try that and post after some time what has happened. love&peace. Cello

[cello75]

well, thank you again so much for your reply - I copied the named text into check-source.sh over the appropiate lines and executed sudo bash wubi-move.sh /dev/sdb4 /dev/sdb3 (for swap on /dev/sdb3 and new ext4 on /dev/sdb4) but it hangs then (graphics are blurred) and shortlybefore that, I can read something like: "Validation of source failed " ,, mmh - I do not think I can handle this at the moment ,, but thank you so much anyway