Windows mount android file system I want to edit some files on my phone but I can not access the root folder on my phone.

I'm using a rooted Google Nexus 5 running Android 5.0.  I can read/write to my /, and /system by Android's ES file explorer but not Windows' software.

How can I mount the Android system file in Windows, so I can read/write to the same places from there? If that's not possible on Windows: I'm also use Ubuntu. So, Can I mount my phone under Ubuntu?
I cannot answer the Windows part – but the Ubuntu part I can answer for sure, as I'm using that as well and mount my devices from my computer, sometimes with full r/w access. What I use needs ADB tools to be installed on your computer. If you didn't already install them, see e.g. Is there a minimal installation of ADB?

Prepare your Droid

First a basic requirement, applying to any OS which might run on your computer: To be able to get full access, the ADB daemon needs to be running in root-mode. This is not the case with stock ROMs, even if rooted, by default (though many custom ROMs have it enabled by default). So first check: If an "ordinary" adb shell directly brings you to the root-prompt (#) without invoking su, you're fine. Otherwise, you will need a helper like adbd insecure: Run it, and enable the "patched insecure mode". Optionally check the box to have that accomplished automatically on every boot of your device.

Prepare for write access to read-only file systems

Second, again independent from the OS on your computer: to read and write to file systems, they need to be mounted in read/write mode. You can accomplish that via adb shell anytime you need to write there (I don't recomment leaving those partitions in permanent read/write mode), e.g. issuing a mount -o remount,rw /system for the /system partition.

Mount your Droid

Now let's go for the specifics. I mount the Android file system via ADB, utilizing FUSE. The tool for that is adbfs-rootless. Compiling the code is easy given the instructions there; that done, copy the resulting adbfs binary to a directory in your $PATH. Then create a mount-point on your computer; in my example, I will use ~/droid for that. Now here we go:

# Mount the Android FS:
adbfs ~/droid
# Unmount it again:
fusermount -u ~/droid


To ease the process, I've created two aliases:

alias mdroid="adbfs ~/droid"
alias udroid="fusermount -u ~/droid"


You surely already have guessed: mdroid stands for "mount droid", udroid for "unmount droid".

A different approach to manually mounting/unmounting is using Midnight Commander with a specific VFS: mc-extfs-adb is doing that. A version I've spefically adapted for Ubuntu is available in the download area at IzzyOnDroid, where you can simply pick it (installation instructions included).

Both variants have their pros and cons: mc-extfs-adb takes quite a while on first access (while it caches the entire file system structure) – but then is pretty fast browsing the file system (as it is cached), only slowing down when you copy/edit files remotely. Using adbfs directly starts up much faster, but then always "hesitates" for a second when switching directories (as it does not cache the entire structure, but only reads on demand). I usually prefer the latter, but YMMV – hence I've given you both options :)