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I have an Asus laptop with Windows and Ubuntu alongside. When I try to boot Windows, it gets to the Windows logo and restarts automatically. Looks like recovery starts but all the recovery options fail. Not even command prompt works. Started startup recovery which ran for a day and did not yield any results. Inserted flash with recovery image—not readable. In Windows recovery option "recovery image" is not visible. CD-ROM—dead.... Ubuntu can not access the HDD.

Ubuntu error message:

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.

Here is my screenshot in Ubuntu. Recovery mode in Windows offers to load drivers. Tried ntfsfix, and recover superblocks... did not work.

Have no clue what I should do. Please help, and be specific if you can as I do not know what am I doing at all!

Oli
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Sonik Pana
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2 Answers2

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If you have an option to remove the HDD and connect it to another PC with Ubuntu, then please do and install the testdisk package which includes photorec (File Recovery) and testdisk (Partition Recovery).

sudo apt-get install testdisk (In case you do not have it)

NOTE: Do not recover the files you get with testdisk/photorec on the same HDD you are recovering from. This will most likely mess stuff up.

You need another HDD to recover the files to.

I also recommend running fsck to check that HDD for problems. If fsck says it is ok, then at least at hardware level you are ok. Software level it is better with either the ntfs-3g tools like ntfsck and ntfsfix. To run fsck do:

sudo fsck /dev/sda2 but be sure to boot either from the Ubuntu you have already installed (If it correctly loads up) or from a LiveCD/LiveUSB. If not, then proceed from another PC. The reason I mention is fsck is to not only verify that the HDD is ok at the hardware level (Because of so many bad sectors and the warnings you got) but also to know that, if fsck can read it, it means you can actually save the information in it.

Just in case, here are 2 good links to recovery information:

Fsck vs Chkdsk

Tools to Diagnose

Community
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Luis Alvarado
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I would use a liveUSB or liveDVD, install testdisk and try to recover data from testdisk.

To Do
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