Mount external volumes at startup
By default, Mac OS X will not mount external Firewire or USB drives until someone logs in. I actually appreciate this, because it improves the system’s security against rogue drives displacing trusted volumes, but it’s problematic when you want a server to share all available drives when starting up unattended.
To change the default behavior so that all available drives are mounted at system startup, you can tweak a hidden preference in the disk mounter:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true
To revert to the default behavior, issue the same command with ‘false’ instead of ‘true’.