Moving a Wubi install to a different Windows 'drive'

Question

I was wanting to move my wubi install from drive E: to C: as to have a working backup location that is not on the drive which I will be migrating to a regular install. (I want to make the E: drive a Linux partition.)

I read moved ubuntu folder from C: to D: drive how to correct UUID entries and How to convert Wubi install into regular install? for migration at another time.

And, I tried to figure out were my grub.cfg file is. The only thing I found was an empty grub directory, and did the following. By going into Windows renaming the Ubuntu folder to Ubuntu-test and tried to reboot into Ubuntu. What I got was an error message with a File: \ubuntu\winboot\wubildr.mbr with the status: 0xc000000f. I rebooted again and went back to Windows and renamed the folder back to Ubuntu. Back to the same Ubuntu with all of my settings and configurations.

I also copied all the files and folders in E:\ubuntu to C:\ubuntu before this renaming and un-renaming above. So the question is: What do need to do in order to move this to C:?

Answer 1

On XP it runs C:\wubildr.mbr. On Windows Vista/7/8 it runs \ubuntu\winboot\wubildr.mbr on the drive you installed on. So moving the Ubuntu folder to a different partition will give you a wubildr.mbr is missing or corrupt message like you saw.

You can just edit the BCD store directly by going to a command prompt (CMD.exe, making sure you select Run as administrator) and then changing the Ubuntu entry:

bcdedit /set {uuid} device partition=C:

(You have to figure out what the uuid is, by first running bcdedit and copying the one that shows for your Wubi entry. e.g.

C:\Windows\system32>bcdedit

Windows Boot Manager
--------------------
identifier              {bootmgr}
device                  partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume2
description             Windows Boot Manager
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {globalsettings}
default                 {current}
resumeobject            {1476af5e-e5bc-11de-b180-0024543ae029}
displayorder            {current}
                        {1476af63-e5bc-11de-b180-0024543ae029}
toolsdisplayorder       {memdiag}
timeout                 10

Windows Boot Loader
-------------------
identifier              {current}
device                  partition=C:
path                    \windows\system32\winload.exe
description             Windows 7
locale                  en-US
inherit                 {bootloadersettings}
recoverysequence        {1476af60-e5bc-11de-b180-0024543ae029}
recoveryenabled         Yes
osdevice                partition=C:
systemroot              \windows
resumeobject            {1476af5e-e5bc-11de-b180-0024543ae029}
nx                      OptIn

Real-mode Boot Sector
---------------------
identifier              {1476af63-e5bc-11de-b180-0024543ae029}
device                  partition=D:
path                    \ubuntu\winboot\wubildr.mbr
description             Ubuntu

C:\windows\system32>bcdedit /set {1476af63-e5bc-11de-b180-0024543ae029} device partition=C:

Any BCD changes have to made while running Windows or booting to a Windows repair prompt.