This is a common scenario….u have installed Linux. u r really excited about it and immediately start checking out the software, games and other cool things already present in the package. After a certain amount of time (which is directly proportional to the level of u r excitement) u realise that u r not able to find u r games , pictures, documents etc which was present on u r Windows system. You start looking for the panic button.
Relax! U r data is most probably safe , depending upon which options u chose on the partition screen during install time.
For accessing other filesystems u need to “mount” that filesystem in Linux.
Windows uses 2 types of file systems FAT32 and NTFS . If ur Windows data is on a FAT32 partition u needn’t worry much as almost all of the popular Linux distributions have FAT32 support enabled. If u Windows system uses NTFS as its file system then a little bit of extra work is needed.
Read the following info on http://www.tuxfiles.org/linuxhelp/mounting.html for some information regarding mounting.
For those with NTFS system ,head on to http://www.linux-ntfs.org/and download the required packages for u r system.
Follow the documentation and if everything goes well , u will be having access to u r documents,pictures etc in Linux also.