A former colleague has a Windows 8.1 computer that had been overtaken by trojans, worms and spyware and was not working well at all. Last week his wife called and asked if I could fix it. I agreed to take a look at it. I downloaded an anti-virus rescue disk that ran on Linux. I couldn’t get the proprietary anti-virus to work but I was able to install Clam anti-virus and install the latest definitions. I discovered in the process that the system needed to be rebuilt using it’s recovery partition. However, none of the factory installed backup solutions worked. I decided I would use a Linux USB drive to boot the computer and save the user’s important files. However, upon re-booting with Linux none of the Windows partitions were mountable. Thank God for an internet search and AskUbuntu.com. I was able a way to mount the Windows drive and backup the files. Here is the solution that saved my friend’s files. Thank you to the person who shared this and here’s hoping this helps someone else.
using the following command , get info about your drives
sudo lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT,LABELThen mount the drives using following command
sudo ntfsfix /dev/sda1Here sda1 is used as example , replace sda1 with corresponding sda number ,command 1 gives the sda number of your drive
and remember windows drives are of ntfs partition