first, you need to know your hdd partitions. For that you can try "fdisk -l" Once you located the partition you want to mount, you need to create a directory on which you'll mount the partition. For example "mkdir /mnt/foo" Then you proceed mounting it: "mount /dev/sdXY /mnt/foo", where sdXY is the partition you find with "fdisk -l". After that you can chroot into it: "chroot /mnt/foo/" This is a the simplest situation (no software raid, etc). YMMV.