Wubi installer/website should warn about potential data loss with root.disk corruption

Thank you for raising this with the Webteam.

We do suggest backing up your data before installing. However, will look at this messaging as part of the next release.

I expect this was more of a problem before we spent lots of effort over the last couple of releases on making sure we always unmounted / cleanly. That kind of work does take a while to trickle down into real systems though.

I agree that we should generally be downplaying Wubi on the website and explaining that it's meant as an initial trial option.

I'm not sure whether it affects recent releases more or less. I think some of it may be incompatible hardware. I've been running Wubi for a long time without problems and I know of others doing the same - but if you checkout #ubuntu on IRC and other support places Wubi often gets panned and/or dismissed as hard to support, buggy and for trial only - so it's good to at least have that 'heads up' rather than leave the impression that, only once things go pear-shaped, it isn't supported and the user should never have used it in the first place.

PS I am attaching some screen shots of the 12.10 diskimage install process. There's been feedback from some that the initial boot into Ubuntu (after the disk image install) is not the most user friendly experience and I'd have to agree.

For 13.04 release we agreed to demote Wubi and not-advertise it as prominently. In the mean time we should continue to fix bugs in Wubi such that maybe it can become fully supported again.

as Dmitrijs noted, we have demoted Wubi and put large warnings on the pages.

Just wanted to make a note in this issue: A colleague sent me a keygen to analyse for malware.

I was too lazy to install VMWare Player and instead used 12.04+WUBI to stick a throwaway ubuntu on disk so I could unpack the PE executable safely.

I had already told Microsoft Security Essentials to ignore the keygen, but guess what happened after I copied the .EXE into the wubi install?

If you guessed "Microsoft Security Essentials deleted root.disk!", you're very correct! It seems as if recently, Microsoft has added the ability to search inside disk images of various types, including VMDK, VDI, VHD and raw disk image files.

Even worse, because the file was so large, Microsoft Security Essentials did not "Quarantine" it, it simply deletes it as soon as the file is found to be unlocked -- So as soon as I had closed down wubi, it evaporated.
After trying to install WUBI again, I figured out it was the virus scanner.

From Windows Explorer, Trying to press the 'delete' key on the new root.disk says "This file is too large for the Recycle Bin. Would you like to delete it?", so I am assuming that same mechanism prevents MSE from quarantine.

Thankful that WUBI will no longer be included in 13.10 to trip other folks up...