How to mount problematic internal hard disk using ubuntu 13.10 [duplicate]

Question

I have a laptop with windows 7. One day i cannot access windows. So I'M trying to use Ubuntu 13.10 live USB ("try only" version) to retrieve important files in the internal hard disk.

when I try to open the internal hard disk it says that:

Unable to access "86Gb Volume"

Error mounting /dev/sda2 at /media/ubuntu/34BC6628BC65E538: Command-line `mount -t "ntfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid,uid=999,gid=999,dmask=0077,fmask=0177" "/dev/sda2" "/media/ubuntu/34BC6628BC65E538"' exited with non-zero exit status 13: ntfs_attr_pread_i: ntfs_pread failed: Input/output error
Failed to read NTFS $Bitmap: 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.

Help me, please

Answer 1

I/O errors (input-output) can be simply a small fault in the NTFS filesystem, or the disk itself could be damaged.

The FIRST thing to try, is either use CHKDSK /f using Windows, or try through Ubuntu with sudo ntfsfix /dev/sdXy (similar to CHKDSK but less powerful) - where "sdXy" is the partition name, for example "sdb2". you can know the name of your partition with sudo parted -l

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Otherwise, if the disk might be physically damaged, you could try to manually mount the hard drive. If that doesn't work, I can indicate another way (copy the entire drive with dd, mount in loop the image, and extract readable content), which requiers a lot of : time/free space.

Manually mount your hard drive

Step 1 : create the directory

 sudo mkdir /mnt/RESCUE

Step 2 : mount the drive

sudo mount -o loop /dev/sdb2 /mnt/RESCUE

Step 3 : copy the content elsewhere

Step 4 : once you have everything you want, you use gparted to erase the disk and his partition table. I recommend creating a temporary EXT4 or FAT filesystem, and delete that before reusing the disk.