Comment 76 for bug 610898

While I'm here, @bcbc: I did some work on the ext4 problem you mentioned. In fact, when I tried to set up a test case, I found that wubildr.mbr hung for me on an ext3 filesystem, never mind ext4. This turned out to be due to lack of support for inode sizes other than 128, and I've backported a patch for this to ntldr-img which should be used in future Wubi builds:

grub2 (1.99-8) unstable; urgency=low

  [ Robert Millan ]
  * Avoid buggy versions of libgeom-dev (see #630107). Closes: #630197
  * Fix grub-probe detection for ATA devices using `ata' driver on kFreeBSD 9.
    - kfreebsd-9_ada_devices.patch

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Update ntldr-img from grub-extras:
    - Handle ext3 inode sizes other than 128.

  [ Debconf translations ]
  * Kazakh (Baurzhan Muftakhidinov). Closes: #630915

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Tue, 21 Jun 2011 02:10:10 +0100

Once I'd fixed this, wubildr.mbr had no problem with my test ext4 filesystem. I therefore suspect that perhaps your ext3 filesystem predated the change of the default inode size to 256?

It would be worth testing Oneiric Alpha 2 when it's released (using a fresh install, since upgrades don't replace wubildr.mbr) to find out whether it fixes this problem for you too. If it doesn't, I'd appreciate a separate bug report.