Just out of interest, did you try running it as a live CD. I've never used wubi, but I've dual booted many desktops and laptops with ubuntu and that's normally my first step to check hardware compatibility.

Of course your problem may just be that the wubi installer isn't very good. Like I say, don't have much experience with that.

Nope just ran the Wubi installer that is now messed up and won't remove the 800Meg it already placed. Guess I'll clean it out manually and stay away from that pos.

I'll second others comments here and try putting Ubuntu in a Virtual Machine. If you load up VirtualBox and grab Ubuntu 9.10 (haven't tried 10.04 yet,) it should install cleanly. If you install the "build-essential" package then install the VirtualBox extras, it's about 20 minutes or less to a fully 3D accelerated Ubuntu desktop.

Don't blame Ubuntu for this though.. Wubi != Ubuntu. It's a third party thing.

If you really want to try Ubuntu; you can boot and run the installer; and during the install process it will allow you to resize your partitions (yes, NTFS too) and make some small space for a real Ubuntu installation.

Now; if that fails - then you can diss Ubuntu . (Of course; if that fails you could also lose your data.. but I won't mention that (hasn't happened to me yet tho!))

Manually clearing out the install (had to do a system restore as well to get it back to clean - still not sure what I missed doing it manually but oh well) - got rid of the 'freeze' on the bootloader when trying to re-install.

So I, since I don't learn from my mistakes, decided to try to install Wubi again (this time on a fresh boot with everything shut down) - and...this time it installed perfectly fine.

Playing with it as we speak...

Glad it worked out for you

Sucks you had to do a sys restore...

System restore was no biggie. Picked a resore point from yesterday and bam I was back in business.

Ubuntu finished the install after the mandatory reboot and wow, it looks a LOT slicker than what I remember. I'll be playing with this tonight Gotta get rid off FF and get Chrome for Linux installed to start with (personal preference)

The one thing I'm 'struggling' a bit with right now is that I remember Ubuntu booting FAST but I am getting a 3-4 mins bootup time (equivalent to my XP startup). Maybe there are ways for me to tweak this though.

Want....Ubuntu on N810

Ubuntu IS on the N810.... b-man I think was doing it. Should be steps in this forum.

As far as bootup - that could be related to the fact that the Ubuntu is installed to files on the NTFS drive.. I'm not sure if a Wubi install suffers to a normal install.

3-4 minutes seems long though; what kind of hardware?

Lenovo T61. 3ish years old not exactly a race horse these days. 80gb hd, 2gb ram. It's my 'play'-laptop

I recall 2 things:
1. I read somewhere (can't really remember where) that installing Linux through Wubi causes the Linux install to boot up slower. I believe it, too. Doing an install on a clean partition would probably decrease the startup time.
2. Assuming you installed 10.04, it's "supposed" to boot up faster than previous versions.

I've installed wubi several times, and it has never failed to work (both on Windows XP and Windows 7). Things to keep in mind for anyone that wants to try it:
1. Download the ISO first, and place it in the same folder as the wubi installer. This gives you more options on how you want to download it (torrents seem to be the fastest way to download newly released distributions). Try placing both on the desktop if they don't work while in a subfolder (I just always do it from the desktop).
2. When using wubi, make sure to choose the same type of install that you downloaded the ISO for. If you downloaded the 9.10 desktop ISO or the 9.10 "netbook remix" ISO, choose the right one. I think Wubi does some sort of file check, so if you want to install a new version that's not included in the installer, you'll just have to wait until they add it. (The last time I tried to use the "official" installer for Wubi, they hadn't included 10.04, and simply renaming the 10.04 ISO to match the 9.10 ISO naming scheme didn't work).
3. If the "official" Wubi installer doesn't support 10.04 (which it didn't soon after release), try this one.