I keep a windows partition on my laptop for the occaisional bit of Photoshop work. A while ago I noticed that Windows had disappeared from my grub boot menu and when I try to mount the windows partion, my system hangs for a bit and then I get this:
Unable to mount 105 GB Filesystem
Error mounting: mount exited with exit code 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to calculate free MFT records: Input/output error
NTFS is either inconsistent, or there is a hardware fault, or it's a
SoftRAID/FakeRAID hardware. In the first case run chkdsk /f on Windows
then reboot into Windows twice. The usage of the /f parameter is very
important! If the device is a SoftRAID/FakeRAID then first activate
it and mount a different device under the /dev/mapper/ directory, (e.g.
/dev/mapper/nvidia_eahaabcc1). Please see the 'dmraid' documentation
for more details.
It seems that chkdsk is a windows command but since I can't boot into windows (since its the windows partition that is the problem) I'm not sure what to do. Here is the output of fdisk to give you the lay of the land:
Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x98000000
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 1 10199 81923436 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 * 10200 22947 102398310 7 HPFS/NTFS
/dev/sda3 22948 29164 49938052+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 29165 30401 9936202+ 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 29165 30401 9936171 82 Linux swap / Solaris
Any guidance would be appreciated!
In this case it's worth checking your NTFS drive first:
sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda2You can start from your Windows CD into recovery mode to perform tasks such as chkdsk. If you have no access to an installation CD you can also download a Recovery CD image.