Why does Wubi fail to boot after removing the NTFS package?

Question

First of all, I installed Ubuntu 12.04 from WinXP and booted onto it. I didn't find my NTFS (later I discovered that it was mounted to /host) and did 'apt-get install ntfs-3g ntfs-config'. This turned into conflict as NTFS was already mounted and I decided to remove these packages.

Now I can't boot into Ubuntu as 'mount' fails.

What to do?

Answer 1

Sorry, but uninstalling and reinstalling Wubi from within Windows XP is the easiest way to fix this.

Note: Uninstall/reinstall will delete your Wubi, including any user data (documents, etc.). One way to prevent that is to move/copy the root.disk file to another directory on the NTFS (C:) drive from Windows. After you reinstall Wubi, you can then mount root.disk and copy user data off of it.

Alternately, you would have to boot from a LiveCD, loop-mount Wubi's root.disk, chroot into it and then reinstall the NTFS packages. Hopefully that should work, but giving you step by step advice is beyond the scope of this answer.