I had to copy stuff from a damaged hard drive recently, and changing the permissions to allow me to access the data kept bombing out. Probably because the drive was damaged, but this guy had FIFTY THREE GIGS of photos (not backed up, of course) that he needed saved. After wasting a ridiculous amount of time trying to get the permissions changed the usual way, I made a bootable Ubuntu flash drive (instructions at https://tutorials.ubuntu.com/tutoria...k-on-windows#0). I put back his hard drive and booted from his system - and I should mention that I couldn't boot from the DVD-ROM into Hirans, nor from a USB version of Hirans, for some reason, or I would have used that.

Again, maybe because it was damaged, I couldn't just load his drive from File Manager. So, I had to do this work around:

First you need to create directory where you can attach windows partition using mount command (for example /media/c for C:
sudo mkdir -p /media/c
Now find out list of partition (click on System > Administration > Disks ) or use following command:
sudo fdisk -l
If /dev/hdb1 is NTFS partition. Now type following command:
sudo mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/hdb1 /media/c
To unmount Windows NTFS partition type command:
sudo umount /media/c
End result - it took TEN HOURS to back up his stuff onto an external hard drive I had attached to the system. Once I got him a new hard drive and loaded WIndows 10 onto it, it took less than five minutes to copy it all back. But boy, was he happy.