trouble mounting usb hard drive

[sandraider]

I successfully set up my harddrive a couple months ago, and I went to use it today, so used the command "sudo mount -a" and I an error message,

Error reading bootsector: Input/output error
Failed to mount '/dev/sdb': 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.

I tried mounting it in windows, but it doesn't detect the harddrive, any ideas on what I should try?

[yancek]

Set it up as what to do what? It appears to be ntfs, is it a windows operating system? windows data partition? Do you have windows on your internal drive? Linux? Did you do as suggested and run chkdsk /f from windows?

Since the error message refers to sdb, is this an external drive?

[atreyu]

Your output says failed to mount 'dev/sdb'. Shouldn't you be mounting a partition on the drive? e.g., /dev/sdb1

Show the contents of your /etc/fstab file.