Now, be very gentle, I'm a a virtual

to Linux - I hadn't realised it would be soooo different to Win XP!
Commands to type, which prog to I type them in - I was looking for Linux equivalent of DOS prompt? - There, you see what a basic stage I'm at.
Windows is on C drive, my old HDD (not a partition) this was showing as D drive in XP , then formatted for Red Hat Linux 9 and installed successfully.
I want to back-up my windows stuff. MP3, word files etc onto the Linux drive - How do I get Linux to see Windows and vice versa? I went into add/remove and came across Samba, which I installed, but could not obviously see it
I dabbled (for only a few days) with another version of Linux in past (gave up) and that was on a partition of same HDD at that time, I managed to see win XP files of Word etc and vice versa, so I know it can be done easily, I'm just missing something no doubt VERY simple.
Once I can get past these basics, I should be OK, but if I can't grasp these, then I'm onto a loser
I know somewhere I need to put "hda" into the equation, I'm fairly sure my Windows Xp HDD is Hda0 and Linux on HDA1, but then again, I'm probably wrong - I need some friendy help from
Please can you just give a bit of basic guidance on these matters
Cheers