How do I access files on my Windows partition from Ubuntu?

Ubuntu supports Windows File Systems by default and you should be able to access them out of the box. What do you see when you open the file manager? There should be a list of your Windows partitions of the left side of the file manager.

If you don't see anything, please click the Ubuntu button on the top-left of the screen. In the Dash, search for "disk" and click on the disk utility application. In here you are able to see your hard disk and partitions. Are they showing up in here?

You should run this command in a terminal after you boot into Ubuntu and login. This should solve a few of the problems with not being able to boot Win7:

  sudo update-grub

Until you fix you WIn7 boot, you can access your other partitions (apart from linux partitions) by running a few commands in a terminal. Make sure you have installed the following packages:

 sudo apt-get install fuse mount mountall mtools udisks usbmount pmount

They should all be already present on your system but it doesn't hurt to check again. Also make sure you have installed 'gvfs' metapackage:

 sudo apt-get install gvfs*

Reboot your computer, and if you are still unable to access your NTFS partitions, you can try to manually mount them as follows.

First you have to create a new directory in your /media folder. '/' is the standard symbol for 'file system' directory. Inside the file system directory, there is a folder named 'media'. This is where you will mount your NTFS partitions, after you create a new directory inside this /media folder. You can name this new directory 'hdd'. To do that, run this command in a terminal:

 sudo mkdir /media/hdd

Insert your password when prompted for it and you're done.

Next, you can mount one or more partitions in /media/hdd by typing in a terminal some codes similar to this one:

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/hdd   

or this one:

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /media/hdd

To find out which one is which, use the disk utility application as suggested by user Gladen in the previous post.

To unmount your partitions, you can use this command in a terminal:

 sudo umount /media/hdd

Hope this helps. Good luck!