Ubuntu – Ubuntu 12.04 won’t load – hangs at Busybox v1.18.5 / initramfs

I want to start by saying that I am very new with Linux (about 1 month using it). I have had no problems up until now.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04 from a Toshiba laptop with 250 GB hard drive and 3 GB of ram.

Everything worked fine yesterday. The only changes I made was was that I downloaded Banshee to try as a replacement for Rhythmbox and did a few recommended updates. This morning I tried to boot and it took a long time and I finally got this error:

mount: mounting /dev/disk/by-uuid/02bc41cc-1e21-4700-a179-be2805a658c4 on /root failed: Invalid argument
mount: mounting /dev on /root/dev failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
mount: mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init.
No init found. Try passing init= bootarg.
BusyBox v1.18. (Ubuntu 1:1.18.5-1ubuntu4) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands
(initramfs)

I'm not sure what to do beyond this point. I have read around on here and haven't found the help I need. I did try to boot it from the Live CD. I can boot up to the Try Ubuntu/Install Ubuntu screen. When I go through the Try Ubuntu selection I can't access my hard disk. When I clicked on it I got this error:

Unable to mount 247 GB Filesystem
Error mounting: mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda/1, missing codepage or helper program, or other error. In some cases useful info is found in syslog – try dmesg|tail or so.

I tried dmesg|tail and saw a string of values but nothing that looked helpful.

I have also tried to boot from the GRUB screen as recovery mode and previous Linux version but they didn't work either.

I tried to load Windows Recovery Environment (loader) (on /dev/sdc3) and got this message:

error: no such device: 268057B1805785E9
error: hd1 cannot get C/H/S values

I had saw somewhere that I could fix this with the Live CD but my knowledge isn't good enough to try. I tried something with Gpart that I had read, but the system told me that I didn't have Gpart. Could someone please explain to me what I need to do and/or haven't
tried yet.