I successfully retrieved all of my data from the XP drive. In the end the best and fastest method I managed to figure out is to load Slaxware LiveCD which has a nice feature to load into RAM and fire up two Konqueror windows, one of the hard disk and the other of the CD ROM drive, and simply copy from one window to the other and bingo, everything came over. I now look forward to learning more about working solely with Linux.

Thanks again for your help.