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I teach computer skills in a computer lab which uses a disk management system on to keep WinXP in a know state between reboots. I'd like to add a Wubi installation, but I keep getting the same error the there's no hibernation file.

Steps:

  1. Unlock the drive
  2. Install Wubi and customize
  3. Relock the drive
  4. Choose to boot Ubuntu
  5. Receive error about NTFS partition not having a hibernation file.

The management system is Saming, which is on network card firmware and is Chinese, so I don't have details about how it works, but I assume that it sets the XP partition to look as if it is hibernated and then loads the hibernation file from memory or something similar.

Has anyone had experience with these types of systems and Wubi? Are there any workarounds?

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  • Is putting Wubi on another partition an option? Why not USB booting?
    – Bruno Pereira
    Feb 23, 2013 at 8:47
  • Computers will be locked and the network (not under my control) uses static addressing. I can't reliably get to the lab soon enough to USB boot 30 computers from USB drives, and I would have to set up static for each USB separately. I'll look at repartitioning, but I'm not sure if that will interfere with the Saming software.
    – Bo Dang Ren
    Feb 24, 2013 at 3:35
  • Are you sure that the system administrators approve of what you want to do? You might get better results with an USB boot - I believe the newest allow for saving between boots.
    – Thorbjørn Ravn Andersen
    Jun 3, 2013 at 12:46
  • @BoDangRen For your point regarding the requirement to quickly boot the lab. Have a look to a feature called LTSP Live available on Edubuntu Live DVD. More details in the following link <edubuntu.org/documentation/ltsp-live>
    – Ahmadgeo
    Jun 3, 2013 at 12:53
  • and be careful on that and engage your network Administrator on it as LTSP Live activated a DHCP server on the local Network it got activated on.... So be sure that your network is well managed and isolated within your lab only. Or your Network Admins will got really annoyed :)
    – Ahmadgeo
    Jun 3, 2013 at 12:58

3 Answers 3

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BCBC is the best Wubi expert I know of:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1639198

I have had the hibernation of a dual-install fail. If hibernation is sharing it's partition that can be a problem.

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Network and system admins are not there to make your life difficult. You need to find out more about how the system works from them, and discuss with them how to add a Ubuntu image to the system.

The boot management system is probably not stored on the network card's firmware, but is likely some sort of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_booting firmware that looks for a PXE server running on your network to download instructions and possibly disk images from.

Without a network or system admin there, someone is going to need to figure out how to use your systems.

  • seriously a year and a half of no sys/net admin at a school is pretty cheap.
  • Windows XP was released in 2002, and it's now 2013 and 3 Microsoft OSes later. New Ubuntu installs will definitely be all around better in every way.
  • Look into the Ubuntu variant of the Linux Terminal Server Project: Ubuntu TSP as a complete replacement for your PXE server and XP disk images.
  • organise a DHCP server for the lab and/or whole network, static IPs are a painful to manage.

If all that is too much for the current staff, then either hire an admin (needs money good luck with that) or simplify and make more tedious and possibly less secure, your systems. By seeing if you can change the boot order in bios to make it boot from the HDD or USB disk before the network card.

If you make it boot from USB before the HDD then you can make a bunch of bootable USB sticks you can put in each machine before class, and remove them when the class is over.

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  • Our single IT guy quit a year and a half ago and hasn't been replaced. "Network and system admins are not there to make your life difficult." No. They're just "not there" at all.
    – Bo Dang Ren
    Aug 5, 2013 at 7:54
  • Perhaps attempt to draft the most obsessive&competent student(s) around as sysadmin(s)?
    – SamB
    Nov 27, 2013 at 2:49
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If you need Ubuntu for just one project you could also consider to run it in a virtual machine such as virtualBox. I think you can install Ubuntu once and then via file-> export appliance make a file that you can import in all other computers.

of course it would be nice to have all the computers run Ubuntu natively but if the hardware is good enough to run a virtualBox I think this would be a neat way to mess with Ubuntu without leaving to much traces on the computers.

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