How to mount a Microsoft basic data partition

I have a Dell Inspiron 5568 laptop that is no longer booting up under Windows 10. The native (Dell) recovery options are not allowing me to backup any of my data prior to attempting a factory reset. Consequently, I have changed the BIOS settings for "legacy boot" and booted up from an Ubuntu Live 16.04 USB stick. Here is what I see

 parted -l reports Partition 1 524Mb FAT32 EFI System partition boot,esp Partition 2 134Mb Microsoft reserved partition msftres Parition 3 495Gb Basic data partition msftdata ... Parition 8 148Gb Basic data partition msftdata Parition 9 472Mb ntfs hidden,dflag Two more hidden ntfs paritions
fdisk -l reports
/dev/sda1 500Mb EFI System
/dev/sda2 128Mb Microsoft reserved
/dev/sda3 460G Microsoft basic data
...
/dev/sda8 138Gb Microsoft basic data
/dev/sda9 450M Windows recovery envirionment
Two others

Before I attempt to do anything else I would like to mount /dev/sda6 and get a safe backup of some critical files I have there. The trouble is it is not clear to me how I mount that partition. I tried

mkdir /media/windows
sudo ntfs-3g -o force,rw /dev/sda6 /media/windows

only to be told that it is not an NTFS parition. If memory serves me right when I did the parititiong I had used the Windows 10 default which I think is FAT32. So I did try

mount -t vfat /dev/sda6 /media/windows

but that yields the error

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sda6, missing codepage or helper program or other error

...very helpful :-) Can anyone here tell me what that might be?

1 Answer

I eventually discovered what was causing this issue. Unbeknownst to me the Dell Inspiron was using Bitlocker so the disk partitions in question were encrypted. Just how this can be is a mystery to me - to the best of my knowledge Windows 10 Home (which I have) does not support BitLocker. Perhaps it is a tweak added in especially for Dell.