Yes! N3RD success! I just finished moving my Wubi Ubuntu installation over to it's own partition, with no frickin' problems at all. Took all day, actually 24 hours since I started last night but it wasn't non-stop work. Started last night with trying to get a Ubuntu Live CD going, and had trouble with and actual CD working. I had to go to a USB flash memory stick as my boot device. Got that working, then went over to Vista to start some clean up. Deleted some stuff, then started to defrag and went to sleep a bit later.
Woke up this morning and defrag was still going (two year old laptop, 240 GB HD, never been defragged). I stopped the defrag and downloaded a program to defrag instead of using the Vista app for it, since it was supposed to be faster. It probably was faster, but it still took another 5 hours until it was done defragging. Finished up some work I was doing and then rebooted using my USB stick to boot into. I then went to shrink my Vista partition, from roughly 224 GB down to 124 GB, that would leave me 4 GB extra in Vista besides what is there (that will increase a decent amount once I uninstall Wubi). This worried me, because I took a huge chance. I only had my Palm Pre to use to back up stuff, plus I was impatient. I backed up a few gigs of stuff onto my Pre incase things went wrong making the partitions, as I read is a very real possibility. gParted (partitioning app) let me know shrinking the Vista partition would take a while so I laid down for a nap.
Three hours later or so I woke up, and Vista's space was shrunk. I made two new partitions out of the open space, a swap partition of 2 GB, and my main Ubuntu partion with the rest, roughly 94GB. I may add a 3rd partition later on to use for my /home directory, but one giant step at a time for me right now. Once that was done I was supposed to reboot into my Wubi Ubuntu install, but I wanted to see if I killed Vista first. It scared me by stopping the boot to do a chkdisk run, but once that finished after about 20 minutes it rebooted and I was able to get into windows just fine. **phew** Went back into Wubi Ubuntu install and downloaded a program called LVPM, which is made to move the Wubi install to the partition. This is huge for me since I didn't want to have to do EVERYTHING over again, especially downloading roughly 20,000 emails if my separate Thunderbird backup didn't work. So I started that, and it took about an hour to finish, I ate some dinner while waiting.
It finished, and then when I rebooted I had to change some GRUB setting so it pointed towards the new partition Ubuntu and not the Wubi install. That was quick and easy as it turned out and I have everything up and running. I am ******* loving this! Dual boot laptop with Vista and Ubuntu.
One note, my half plus day in Vista after a good amount of time in Ubuntu, I actually felt cramped in Vista. I couldn't switch to a new desktop, and it drove me nuts. That alone is a big enough reason to switch to Ubuntu.
Bookmarks