Thanks for the reply and the direction. Sorry it took so long to respond. I was away at work. I was able to download ubuntu and burn in to disk. I loaded it into my laptop and it booted up into ubuntu. The problem I am now facong is that apparently the version I have is a newer version than the one the instructions on the site that you directed me to is. I played around with it and actually got to the step about typing in commands in the "terminal" But none of the commands work. All I get is a " No such file or directory" This is what my error window says, which is nothing like the example on ubuntu. "
UNABLE TO ACCESS "729 GB VOLUME"
Error mounting /dev/sda2 at/ media/ubuntu/36B4DBC4B4DB84B1: Command-line 'mount -t "ntfs" -o
"uhelper = disk2,nodev,nosuid,uid=999,gid=999,dmask=0077,fmask=0177:""/dev/sda2""/media/ubuntu/36B4DBC4B4DB84B1" exited with non-zero exit status 14: Windows is hibernated, refused to mount.
Failed to mount'/dev/sda2': Operation not permitted. The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option
Any suggestions?
UPDATE:
Was able to figure out the command thing. But ater the step where I tell Ubuntu to force the mount, I keep getting the message " Windows is hibernated, refused to mount. Failed to mount'/dev/sda2': Operation not permitted. The NTFS partition is in an unsafe state. Please resume and shutdown Windows fully (no hibernation or fast restarting), or mount the volume read-only with the 'ro' mount option: