moving files between windows and linux
 

When I installed Linux I installed from my hard drive. It told me to make a FAT partition so Linux would be able to read the files. Does this mean I can place files from windows on that partition to xfer them to linux? How? (partition is letter "z")

When you are in Windows, copy your files on the FAT partition (in this case z: )
When you are in Linux, you will need to mount that partition.
If it is not already mounted when the system boots, you will need to create it.
Open the /etc/fstab file and you may see that partition is already configured.

If not, in order to set up auto-mounting, you will need to login as root. At the command line, type: su -

You need to create a directory. Type: mkdir /mnt/shared

To see your partition table in Linux, type: fdisk -l

Then, you can mount your windows (shared) partition by typing:
Note: Replace the X with the partition number obtain from the partition table.
To un-mount the partition, type:
You can also mount the partition automatically by adding it to the /etc/fstab file.
The line should look something like this:

Yes it does. Basically the partition letter means nothing under linux, all partitions are 'mounted' to a directory of your filesystem. To do this you would type (as root) something like:

mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows

the /dev/hda1 part is the partition you want to mount, and the /mnt/windows is just some empty directory you want to mount it to, this can be anything you want, just make the directory somewhere.

as for the first part, your hdd are refered to as hda, hdb, hdc etc and the partitions are numbered. so in this example hda1 is the first partition of the first disk drive.

type 'man mount' for more details.

if you want it to be mounted at boot time you need to add a line to /etc/fstab

'man fstab' to see the format for that

do you have to chmod a+rw /mnt/shared to mount vfat? or is that strictly for ntfs. ;)

No, if you want users to be able to read & write, you mount with: user,rw,uid=1000