If you dual boot Windows and Linux on your computer and you want to access Windows partitions while you are on Linux, then it can be done easily by mounting the Windows partitions on Linux.
Windows partitions are either FAT or NTFS. You can access both FAT and NTFS partitions in Linux easily.
Go to Applications > Accessories > Terminal to open the terminal Windows. Now create an empty directory where you want to mount the Windows partition, for instance, if you want to mount the D: drive of Windows in Linux, create a directory with name d in mnt folder.
# sudo mkdir -p /mnt/d
Now use the following command to find the names of partitions to mount.
# sudo fdisk -l
The output of the above command will be like,
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 2432 19535008 86 NTFS
/dev/hdb2 2433 2554 979965 82 Linux swap
/dev/hdb3 2555 6202 29302560 83 Linux
Its clear from the output that /dev/hdb1 is a Windows partition (NTFS). To mount it into the folder we created above, use this command,
# sudo mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/hdb1 /mnt/d
In case you also have FAT partitions on your Windows install and you want to mount those, then just change the files system type in the above command command,
# sudo mount -t vfat -o iocharset=utf8,umask=000 /dev/hda1 /mnt/d
To unmount any of the Windows partitions, use this command.
# sudo umount /mnt/d
Note: I am dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux. I tested this method on my system. However, since it uses the basic linux commands only, it should work on any dual book config. If you have any issue using this method, use the comments form below to post your doubt.
