Accessing Your Files on Your Computer’s Hard Drive

To access the files from your computer’s hard drive (the files that you normally accessed in Windows), you can use the “Files” application.

Step 1. Click on the “Activities” menu.

Step 2. Click on the “Files” Application icon.

Step 3. Click on “Other Locations”.

Under the section called “On This Computer”, you will see all your hard drives. The first listed called “Computer” is the Xtra-PC® Ultra drive. Any other drives listed below this are your computer’s hard drive.

In this example, there is a drive called “Windows”. This is the Windows OS hard drive in your computer and the one we want to access our photos on. Your Windows OS hard drive may be called something else besides “Windows”.

*NOTE: The icon for “Windows” does NOT have any padlock symbols on it and does not say “Encrypted”. If it does show a padlock icon and says the drive is encrypted, it means that your hard drive in your computer is encrypted and needs a password to allow access to it. This is almost always the Windows built-in encryption called “BitLocker”. Please see the next section, Accessing Your Files on Your Computer’s Hard Drive Encrypted with BitLocker, for detailed instructions on accessing files with BitLocker encrypted drives.

Step 4. Continuing this example, click on “Windows”.

Step 5. Enter your user password and then click “Authenticate”.

Step 6. You will now see the files and folders on your local hard drive that contains your files. Click on the “Users” folder.

Step 7. Click on the folder called “tester”. “tester” is the Windows username on this computer. Instead of “tester”, you will see your Windows username.

Step 8. Click on “Pictures”. You should now see your photos that are on your local computer.