Test Driving Linux

Accessing Files on Your Windows Hard Drive

Chapters 4 and 7 in this book discuss using multimedia files and editing pictures. Even though the Move CD doesn't come with any music to listen to, videos to watch, or pretty pictures to edit, it does let you access your Windows hard drive and use the files you have there.

This might make you a little nervous. But don't worry—really! The Move CD will not do anything bad to your hard drive or your files. Move only lets you read your Windows files—in other words, you can't make any changes to the files or delete them in Move. This means that all your data remains safe, and there is nothing Move can do to mess up your Windows computer.

Accessing your Windows files is very easy in Konqueror. First, click the Home icon on your desktop to open Konqueror, and click the up button until you are in the root folder (it should take two clicks). One of the directories shown is called mnt. This stands for mount—in Linux, when you access a storage device, such as a hard drive or USB memory key, you are said to be mounting your filesystem on that device. You access a mounted filesystem through a mount point, which is just a fancy name for a directory. Most Linux users put all of their mount points in one place, the mnt directory.

So double-click the mnt icon to see what mount points are available to you. In my case, I have only one mount point, called win_c. Double-click your mount point, and you should see your entire Windows system (as shown in Figure ...