LinuxQuestions.org - Couple of questions about Dual-booting, and .TARred files

Ok, let me start off by saying that I am a complete idjit as far as linux goes, so make any answers as simplistic as humanly possible. :o

Ok, First: I want to have my system set up as a dual boot with XP and RedHat 8.0, I partitioned my hard drive in windows with PartitionMagic, although i did'nt make the two "recommended" boot disks with PartitionMagic. So i got linux set up just fine, i wanted to use BootMagic (part of the partitionmagic prgram) to boot my system, and therefore didnt set up the linux one, think it's called GRUB?, anyway, now my computer only will boot to linux with a boot disk, and i cant get to windows...i dont have a boot disk for that either. D*** boot discs!!!! SO, now i would be perfectly happy with ANY bootloader at all, unfortunately, i don't know jack about linux yet (havent used it for but about 6 hours total so far). So if anyone knows how i can, A) Set up the linux bootloader and configure it to see my XP partition as well. B) Get into windows and use bootmagic as i had orginally intended. Either would be awesome but i would prefer B. Also, you should know that i have tried to search these forums and ran across something called WinLiLo, that was supposed to help me boot windows, but it didnt work, im not sure I unpacked the file right. BOOM! perfect segway into my next question (as if this isn;t long enough already). Files ending in *.tar.gz.....what do i do with those? i have read some of the command line instructions in different places, but these seem to vary by version/release, whatever, and i have no clue where (if anywhere) im unzipping these tarballs to. So some basic help (i can play around with it once i get a basic understanding) with this would be great. Sorry for the long post thanks for the time.

-Sub :newbie: