We have a hard drive in an older HP laptop that has failed but does not have a complete back up.
We can't boot Windows at all--just get a hard disk error. I installed Ubuntu to a USB (from a working computer) and booted the "dead" computer from that and came up with the following error:
Error mounting /dev/sda2 at /media/ubuntu/CE2A6BV92A6BACE1: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=999,gid=999" "/dev/sDA2" "/media//ubuntu/CE2A6BV92A6BACE1"' exited with non-zero exit status 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error Failed to read $MFTMirr: Input/output error. Failed to mount '/dev/sda2': 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.
So...given that I have no clue what any of that means and I can't boot into Windows at all, what can I do from here?
chkdsk /f
. If anything is unclear I will post a step by step answer.