How do I access my Vista documents and settings directory form Ubuntu?

Can you explain a bit more about what you want to do? The live CD will not give you access to write to the windows file system. It's a security thing. You wouldn't want someone to erase a bunch of important files. If you can "see" the windows drive then you are good to go. You should be able to open it and see what is essentially the c drive. Drill down through the folders to find what you are looking for. If you have another drive connected that is fat32 or something you should be able to copy files to that drive for back up.

As for finding the specific files you are looking for that is a matter of knowing the windows file system structure. Documents and settings is a root level folder so once you open the drive you should see that. I don't recall where windows stores the email and favorites but I think it's all in each users folder.

What I'm trying to do is have a disk I can boot a computer that's having a problem from and then copy the essential files from it to a USB or thumb drive. I can see most everything now when I boot into Ubuntu but when I drill down into the documents and settings folder I can't see the user profiles. As you know that's where most of the files I'm going to want to recover are going to be such as the my documents folders and PST files.

I understand about it being a security issue and it's a good thing to not be able to just wander around in the D&S folder. But if I could authenicate with a user name and password then Windows should grant me access. I can see where you mount a drive there's an options field is there a way to put in a username and password?

Actually, the only security is the fact that you can't write to the NTFS drive and it's more just security to prevent you from messing it up. NTFS write ability in Linux has been "experimental" but seems more stable now. There is not, as far as I know, any kind of file security. With the live CD I believe you can look into any folder you want to on windows. Now, if the content is encrypted that would be different. I have no clue how to access that.

I don't know why you can't see into the d&s folder. I can open mine and look into what ever user I want and I have not added anything beyond a normal install. If you can see the drive then you should be able to see anything that is "seeable". If your computer is having problems, there might be drive problems that are the reason you can't find what you are looking for.

One thought. Is this an XP or Vista drive? Vista seems to have changed the structure of user folders and while there is a documents and settings folder it's empty (at least on my system). I don't know what this folder is for now. However, there is a folder called users where documents and such are kept. I'm afraid I haven't really spent much time with Vista so I don't know much about it.

Okay, that was a dumb question. I see now that you are talking about a vista system - big blue letters and all :). So, yeah, check the user folder rather than the doc and setting folder like you would have in XP. Hope that helps. Sorry for any confusion.

You're right about the user directory, I guess the Documents and Settings are left over from a previous xp install. But when I go to the user directory it's the same thing I can see users and default, all users, administrators and my folder but when I go past the user fold to My Documents nada. I'll have to keep looking is there any more documentation on ntfs-3g?

Actually, I have the D&S folder on a clean install. I have no idea why they changed or why they left an unused folder. For more info on NTFS3G, you can look here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MountingWindowsPartitions/ThirdPartyNTFS3G

But I don't think it will help. That only adds the ability to write to the NTFS partition, not read from it. Look for a folder called Documents rather than My Documents. Again, Vista seems to have changed things. The other option would be just copy the whole user folder to somewhere else and sort it out later. However, if you are looking in the right folders and you can't see see any files then, I'm sorry to say, it's probably because there is nothing to see. You don't need to add or activate anything to view files on a windows drive. You could always open up the file browser (Nautilus) as root and that should uncover anything if anything is being hidden. To do that, open a terminal (apps - accessories) and then type

gksudo nautilus

I kind of doubt it will make any difference but you can try.

hey hope this helps... i had the same problem

use the directory

/media/vistaos/users/your user name/documents

there will be no problem getting in then