Andrew Greig <pushin.linux@gmail.com> writes:
Given that I will have to mount this drive (Win XP) what values do I extract from dmesg to do that?
Ask /proc/partitions. Look for a likely size, then run file -s on the device to confirm it's the kind of filesystem you expect.
Gentoo has some empty directories set up in /mnt so I could use one of those, or should I be mounting into /media?
FHS 2.3 basically says /mnt is for ad-hoc stuff done by the sysadmin, whereas /media is more for GUI automounty stuff. So /mnt/x would be better in this case, though it doesn't really matter.
or would booting the system up with drive powered up and connected produce a better outcome?
Depends how you connected it. USB and SATA *should* both be hot pluggable, meaning you can plug them in post-boot and they should appear. This is not the case for PATA.