Problem when booting Ubuntu - Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

Question

When starting Ubuntu I get an error message that says:

An error occurred while mounting /windows.
Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery.

Searching the internet I saw that I should open the /etc/fstab file from the terminal, but when I open that file I do not know what to do. This is what appears in my /etc/fstab file:

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/sda9 during installation
UUID=eff4b2da-0926-4c1e-aadc-cc1f02f13983 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot was on /dev/sda7 during installation
UUID=86d9aa0b-d72c-4050-8841-5cced37d5c45 /boot           ext4    defaults        0       2
# /boot/efi was on /dev/sda1 during installation
UUID=A809-EAE3  /boot/efi       vfat    defaults        0       1
# /home was on /dev/sda10 during installation
UUID=85f4c1f1-53a0-4c78-83e7-badaca16bf65 /home           ext4    defaults        0       2
# /windows was on /dev/sda5 during installation
UUID=EE28D21928D1E09F /windows        ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       0
# swap was on /dev/sda8 during installation
UUID=02f941ad-edf0-4fe2-bf80-3536bbfd54af none            swap    sw              0       0

Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Solution

The question is what do you wish to do? You obviously have a windows partition on that machine that linux fails to mount.

Can you boot into that windows from GRUB?

Do you wish to keep that windows partition on the machine or not?

You can edit /etc/fstab in such a manner that linux will stop trying to mount that windows partition

From a terminal (ctrl+alt+t) run

gksudo gedit /etc/fstab

and comment the line

UUID=EE28D21928D1E09F /windows        ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       0

by adding a # at the beginning of it like so:

# UUID=EE28D21928D1E09F /windows        ntfs    defaults,umask=007,gid=46 0       0

This should stop linux from prompting that during boot, but you should address this issue at its core and recover/remove that partition as you see fit.

Comments

[iffy]

english please. Can you boot into that windows partition?

[Daniel Muñoz Hdez]

Truly I am new to ubuntu and only know I have that problem. thank you. I'm not sure I should do. I guess I should give m to recover manually, but I dont know there to do after

[user3757405]

Your system probably doesn't need to have /windows mounted in order to boot, so you can just Skip mounting it, and analyse the problem once the system is booted.