5.5 Accessing the Windows Partition from the Desktop

The first step in mounting a partition using the desktop environment is to launch the disks utility. With the desktop loaded, right-click on the desktop background and select Open Terminal from the resulting menu. Within the terminal window, gain root privileges before launching the Disks utility as follows:

$ gnome-disks

Once the disks tool has launched, a window similar to that shown in Figure 5-12 will appear:

Figure 5-12

To view information about a partition, select it from the graphical representation in the Volumes section of the dialog. In the above example, the Windows system partition is selected and highlighted. To mount the partition so that the contents can be accessed from within Ubuntu, select the partition and click on the options button indicated in Figure 5-13 to display the menu:

Figure 5-13

From the menu, select Edit Mount Options... to display the dialog shown in Figure 5-14. Turn off the User Session Defaults switch and make sure that both the Mount at system startup and Show in user interface options are enabled. Within the Mount Point text field, change the path to /mnt/windows. If the partition needs to be automatically mounted each time the system reboots, also enable the Mount at system startup option:

Figure 5-14

With the changes made, click on the OK button to return to the main dialog. To mount the partition, simply click on the mount button highlighted in Figure 5-15 below:

Figure 5-15

Once the partition is mounted, exit from gnome-disks and note that an icon for the volume has appeared in the dock as shown on Figure 5-16 (note that if the Show in user interface option has been disabled this icon would not be present):

Figure 5-16

Double click on the icon to browse the partition using the Files tool:

Figure 5-17

To unmount the partition, click on the mount button (which will have changed to a stop button) as shown in Figure 5-15 above.