I want to use both Ubuntu Wubi 11.04 and Ubuntu Wubi 12.04 so that the boot menu will displays 3 options: Windows, Ubuntu 11.04 & Ubuntu 12.04. My current approach is to only use either of them, and disable the other. Is there anyway to do it?
Ubuntu – How to enable booting multiple Ubuntu Wubi
dual-bootwubi
Best Answer
You can't do it via the Windows boot manager. You can only do it with the manual switching (as you are apparently doing) or via a custom grub entry.
Step by step:
\ubuntu
directory to\ubuntufirst
(or to be quicker, rename to\ubuntufirst
, and then create a new\ubuntu
directory withuninstall-ubuntu.exe
, which is required to uninstall the first release)boot Ubuntu and add a custom grub entry to boot the first release. You would edit
/etc/grub.d/40_custom
and then runsudo update-grub
. You can copy the entry from the/boot/grub/grub.cfg
on the install you want to boot. An example of the entry would be something like the following:A couple things to note... you change
loop0
toloop1
becauseloop0
will be in use already (with your original install). Also, use/vmlinuz
instead of/boot/vmlinuz-3.x.x-x-generic
because then you don't have to keep updating it (/vmlinuz
points to the latest). The same applies to/initrd.img
Here's my working example (in this case the copy is in the same
\ubuntu\disks
folder):This is what it looks like when booted
If you use this technique you probably should update
/etc/fstab
to reflect the updated locations. It won't affect/
but if you have a separate/home
or you want to use the correctswap.disk
.In my opinion, this isn't a useful solution for most people. Wubi is designed to be simple for beginners. But if you are using it to test different releases, there aren't many options for booting into them, other than renaming the
\ubuntu
directory and updatingC:\wubildr
each time.NOTE: When Grub is updated on a Wubi install, it will rebuild the
/wubildr
file and this will point to whatever the current virtual disk is. In the above example, it will point atprecisenew.disk
. This is likely undesirable as it's simpler to have a master install. To avoid this happening you can either keep backups of yourC:\wubildr
file, or edit/usr/share/lupin-support/grub-mkimage
on the secondary install (not your main one):