CANT ACCESS D: DRIVE

I can try to help you here. Your D: drive your referring to will no longer be called a D drive in linux. Linux doesn't use the drive letter schema like windows does. Your D drive on Windows could have been a CD drive or it could have been a secondary hard drive partition. Either way its not hard to find. If the drive is NTFS you won't have write access to that drive by default in ubuntu, this will require external modules. You need to locate the device that your calling your D drive. To do this at the command line type this:

$sudo fdisk -l

You should see a list returned of different block devices that are connected to your system. SCSI devices are /dev/sd<letter><num> the letter denotes the drive sequence, for example if you have 2 scsi disks you should have /dev/sda and /dev/sdb the numbers relate to which partition on that hard drive it has. Example /dev/sda1 is the 1st partition on drive A, which is most likely drive C: on your Windows Install.. You may however see /dev/hda<num> hda refers to ide drives, this is actually what you will probably see.

When you fdisk -l look for the HPFS/NTFS or W95 Ext'd or W95 Fat
because those are most likely the drives you wish to mount.

Ok now you need to mount the drive to a folder.. In ubuntu mounts usually go in /media so you will need to make a new directory in /media you can make it windows for example
$sudo mkdir /media/windows

Now you can mount the partition to /media/windows

to do this you need to identify the device like I said above that is using NTFS or W95 file system.

if for example it is /dev/hda1 then do this

sudo mount -t vfat /dev/hda1 /media/windows

Then to verify it mounted type:

$cd /media/windows
$ls

After you issue ls, it should provide you with the directory contents.

If it all worked well you can add this to your /etc/fstab ( be sure to substitute /dev/hda1 with the appropriate device that you found by fdisk -l!!)

$sudo gedit /etc/fstab

Now in the gedit editor add the following lines:

/dev/hda1 /media/windows vfat defaults,auto,utf8 0 0

Please note if its NTFS you can use the -t ntfs intstead of -t vfat in the mount option and as well as the /etc/fstab..

Now from now on your drive will be in /media/windows

I hope I didn't go too overboard here. Hope it works!!

If you install Ubuntu from scratch again using the Alternate Installer CD, it will automatically put these extra partitions as drives accessible via your desktop.

The livecd should do that the same as the alternate cd does. You shouldn't notice any difference if you installed with the alternate disc.