So if you have physical access to a machine that is not encrypted it is really trivial to gain access to the hard-drive and all files on it.
This is how you do it
Just follow this guide for ubuntu http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu
If the machine doesn't automatically detect the usb you might have to enter into the bios. This can usually be done by pressing F12 or F1 on boot. Bios looks different from machine to machine. But you need to just choose to boot from the USB-device.
Now you have booted into the live-usb, now we need to mount the hard-drive to the usb-linux-filesystem. First we want to find out what partitions we have:
sudo su
fdisk -l
This will give you a list of partitions. They will look something like this
/dev/sda1
/dev/sda2
Identify from the list the partition you want to mount.
Here we create a space for where we want to mount the partition.
mkdir /media/windows
mount -t ntfs /dev/sda1 /media/windows
-t
means type, and refers to the filesystem-type. And we choose ntfs which is the windows-filesystem.
Now you can access all the files from the harddrive in /media/windows
Notice that is is umount
and not unmount.
umount /media/windows
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