Hmm this might be a nooby question, im not really sure, but how would i transfer files from my windows using the NTFS file system to my Mandrake Linux 9.2 EXT3...is there any easy way, because i heard that you need some drivers that the new kernal 2.6 has.

Depends on where the NTFS files are. Are they on the same mahine, or elsewhere on a network? If on the same machine:

mount -t ntfs /dev/hdx /mnt/nt

will work, provided /mnt/nt exists and 'x' represents the ide channel and partition where windows lives. If you're trying to pass files over a network, study up on samba.

note: ntfs is read-only, so don't try to write linux files onto a windows mount

Which version of Mandrake are you using? Anythin gnewer usually accomodated NTFS already. That access has been around for quite a while. Write access is not recommended though, as it'll not be accessable to Windows anymore. You should already have an automount for your Windows partition ready to access. if you read from the partition, you'll be fine. I'm watching a movie that's on my spare NTFS partition as I type this from within my ReiserFS-partitioned Mepis distro. If you wanna transfer from the NTFS partition, that's no problem. You have two choices: you c an open a terminal and mount the windows partition and use the cp command to copy the files from there to your /home partition. Or, you can mount the partition and fire up konqueror (or nautulus, if you Gnome) and drag the files from one window to the other, just like Windows (except your choices are available as a left-click as well as a right-click). Don't write to NTFS from Linux, though. That's not supported well yet.

I take it writing to an NTFS partitioned disk across a network is okay though? As it's actually the windows O/S on the remote machine tha's handling the disk writes?

Correct