First open terminal by holding ctrl + alt then click t. With Terminal open you are ready to begin.
Next, you will want to list your drives. You have a few options. I like fdisk
but you could also run lsblk
as it may be easier for you. You can skip down to lsblk
as I explain this below too.
fdisk
fdisk -l
This will output a bunch of details about your hard drives. What you are looking for is /dev/sd*
(* in this case, means any letter a-z. e.g. My primary drive is /dev/sda
)
You will also want to look at the Device details for the drive to identify the partition on the drive that holds the OS. For me, this is /dev/sda1
. (sda
being the hard drive, sda1
with 1 being the partition of the drive that is my OS. You can tell this due to the size of the partition.)
Next you will want to see what is already mounted.
df -h
Will show you what is currently mounted. You are making sure that the drive you identified in the first step is not already listed in here (this would be /dev/sda1
as my example above) as mounted. If it is located in this list, you will see the mount point (where you need to go to access the drive) on the right side and there is nothing more to do other than to cd
to that location to access your files.
lsblk
lsblk
This outputs a simple representation of your hard drive structure that is easier to understand than fdisk
. You are still trying to identify the hard drive location /dev/sda
and the OS partition /dev/sda1
as I explain in fdisk
. You can see in this output if there is a mount point for the drive you are looking for too; if so, there is nothing more to do other than to cd
to that location to access your files.
Mounting the Drive
If you do not see the drive listed as mounted, you will want to mount it.
To mount the drive you need to first prepare a location to mount it. I like to use /mnt/Windows
so let's create that mount point.
sudo mkdir /mnt/Windows
Now that the mount point is created, to mount the drive to it you run: (Note that I am using /dev/sda1
as /dev/sda
is the drive I wanted to mount and the partition on the mount is 1 for my case; if yours is different you will want to use that letter you got from step 1)
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/Windows
Now you should be able to see the files by running ls
ls -la /mnt/Windows
lsblk
Then, please copy and paste the output into your question. Also, to properly format the output as code, highlight the text and then press CTRL+K before saving your edit to your question. If this is too much, just post the output and someone like me will fix the formatting for you. Thanks!