Hey, I normally use windows, and recently I had a disaster, and i need to reformat my hard drive and start over. I need to copy all of my pertinent information to my external hard drive. Windows has decided that it would not like to start in any way, shape, or form. I pulled out my ubuntu cd and started it with that. Worked fine, except it didn't mount my internal hard drive automatically, but it did mount my external one. i need to know how i can mount it and copy over the files that i need. Thanks


please no comments about linux is better. i haven't had the time to switch

If you have a bunch of files you need to save is there any way to repair your old operating system? For anyone to be able to help, use ubuntu and go to konsole as root and type fdisk -l, hit enter and post the results here. By posting fdisk they can see if the file format is fat 32 or ntfs.

no, i can't repair my operating system. I've looked everywhere, nobody has any way but to wipe clean and reinstall.
results of typing fdisk -l:
on top is useless info

bottom is
device boot start end blocks id system
/dev/sdb1 1 24321 195352481 7 HPFS/NTFS

This is my external hard drive, it doesn't list anything about my internal one

Instructions to mount your Windows partition in Ubuntu
click terminal in Ubuntu desktop, then

You will still have a problem of copying the files if you are new to the terminal mode commands.

If you want to drag and drop as in Windows then download the current version of Slax as it gives you the root privilege as well as writing on ntfs partition seamlessly.

In Ubuntu you may not even see the interior of the Windows partition in the desktop as it is treated as a protected partition from the ordinary users.

To salvage the whole disk take a look at this thread