Ubuntu – How to access the Windows partition

hard drive

I have Ubuntu 12.04 installed on my HP G62-453 TU Laptop. I cannot access the contents of my hard disk partition E.

Best Answer

This is assuming that you have installed Ubuntu in a dual-boot setup alongside Windows.

Open the terminal, and type df -h

This will show you the drives mounted as well as occupied and free space. Look for the filesystem mounted at /

This is your Linux partition.

Now type cd /dev/, then ls.

You should see several entries like

sda sda1 sda2 sdb sdb1 sdg sdg1

Each sd* is a storage volume, and the number is the partition. The above example has two partitions (sda1, sda2) on the boot drive and two external drives available(sdb, sdg). You need to mount the partition before accessing it. On my system, I have four partitions set up on my boot drive

sda sda1 sda2 sda3 sda5

where sda5 is my Linux partition, sda2 is the Windows partition and sda3 is the common storage partition.

To mount the drives right now, type sudo mount /dev/sdaX, where X is the number of the partion to mount.

To automatically mount the drives on boot, install mountmanager by typing

sudo apt-get install mountmanager

This installs an application that allows you to configure the auto-mounting of drives upon boot. Open it up, and in the filetree select the sd* partition available, then enter the mount point for the partition. I use the /media/ folder as the base mount point, then you specify the mount folder.

For example, my /media/ folder looks like

Library/ Storage/ Windows/

Once you've done this, you apply the changes via Partition -> Apply

This should make your partition visible in both Natutilus and the command line in /media/

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