# Is Wubi completely safe?



## Emiiya (Jul 13, 2010)

I'm very interested in at least trying out Ubuntu. On my Toshiba laptop, I currently have Windows Vista as the sole OS. The thing is, this is a brand new laptop I use for personal and school work and I cannot afford to mess it up. For this reason I don't wanna mess with the partitions and set up a traditional dual-boot since I've never done it before and I don't wanna risk anything.

So I've heard about Wubi, and most of the reviews seem to be positive, however there were some bad reviews about it. So, I want to ask experienced people who have used it before on a Vista - just how safe is it? I backup all my documents and pictures regularly now on an external hard drive, but I don't really feel like going really in-depth and backing up the whole drive...what are the chances of something going wrong? I know I can uninstall it on Windows if I don't particularly like it...but what if everything goes wrong and everything's fried and the computer doesn't boot?

Sorry if it's totally safe and I'm overreacting. This week I've been working on two dead Windows computers...I'm a little tired of computers not working right at the moment.

[EDIT] As an alternative...is Ubuntu portable like Puppy is? Can I just use it from the live CD, without touching anything on my laptop's hard drive, but still access internet, save files on the cd, etc? Is this possible?


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## saikee (Jun 11, 2004)

Portable Ubuntu is a guest system you install into a MS Windows which acts as a host. It differs from the virtual machine software, like VMware or VirtualBox, by cutting out the virtual machine management layer software completely.

I have not used Wubi but I know it is just a Windows program to help a Winodws user installing Ubuntu without the need to know anything about Linux.

To me a traditional installation is safer especially if you run the distro first as a Live CD, like Puppy, and familiarize with the device names etc as a Drive "C" is called differently in Linux like /dev/sda1. In a traditional installation the Linux must be installed in its own partition and has its own filing systems so it is safer as it can't possibly mixed up with a MS Windows. It does requires you to do partitioning, resizing a partition and tell the installer where to put the Linux etc.

All PC operating systems can coexist safely in a hard disk.

You can run any Live CD safely and write information on any floppy, CD, hard disk or USB flash drive as a full blown operating system.


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## Ent (Apr 11, 2009)

With regards your alternative, a live CD is set--you can't write any files, add any programs, etc to the CD. You can however make a USB flash/thumb/pen drive bootable much as a live CD. Using a system called Casper you can set that up to hold files and programs, making it a convenient test medium. 

If you really want to learn about Linux though, you should really try and set up a dual boot. And for that, there's probably no-one better than Saikee to guide you through safely. If you make a backup image of your hard disk before hand you'll be safe enough.


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## 1002richards (Jan 29, 2006)

I started off with Wubi 'cos I was cautious about partitioning. Having tried and liked Wubi alongside Vista I now dual boot and following good on-line guides and reading postings by Saikee here and elsewhere I had no difficulties.


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## itsjusme (Aug 19, 2006)

> [EDIT] As an alternative...is Ubuntu portable like Puppy is? Can I just use it from the live CD, without touching anything on my laptop's hard drive, but still access internet, save files on the cd, etc? Is this possible?


As far as i know, PUPPY LINUX is the only version at this time that you can save your configuration files and data back to the cd/dvd with. *BUT*, it has to be properly burned as a MULTI SESSION disk in order to do this. You have to use the burning program in PUPPY(Burniso2cd) or one of the other distro`s of LINUX to make it work properly. I have read of people getting it to work properly by burning with other software, but havent seen it work or had succes with it personally. It works very well though , but your limitation is how much ram you have, the more you write to the cd/dvd the more gets loaded into ram when you boot up, unless you use one of the cheat codes to ignore saved sessions. It makes a great little portable OS. You can however put a great many of the different LINUX distro`s on USB and save data back to the usb. You can also boot from the live cd and save data back to a persistent file on a usb drive with most of the mainstream distro`s.


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## TerryNet (Mar 23, 2005)

My experience has been pretty much the same as *1002richards*'s. Used Wubi to install Kubuntu and then Ubuntu in Vista and Ubuntu in XP. Now use separate partitions. I'd rate Wubi as being safer than most Windows applications since it only runs for a very short time--just the time it takes to set up Ubuntu.


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