Firewire drives dont mount on Panther Macs on startup

[sjsadler]

I recently upgraded a dual G4 machine from 10.2.8 to 10.3.4.

Attached to the machine I had a 330 GByte LaCie firewire drive part of which was shared via nfs and samba so other machines could access the data. I'd been using the machine as a data server in this way for over a year. Before upgrading I'd updated the drivers on the firewire device to ensure there would be no data loss.

Now the shared drive is not visible (or apparently mounted) unless somebody has logged into the mac.

If nobody is logged into the mac and the machine is accessed via telnet the shared drive cannot be found in the /Volumes folder (though there are entries for it in /dev) and the drive data can't be accessed across the network.

When somebody logs into the mac, the drive appears on thier desktop, it can be seen in folders and will correctly mount on remote machines. It does appear to unmount when they log out breaking any network shares.

I can replicate this behaviour on a seperate (10.3.4) mac with different firewire drive but haven't been able to find any documentation indicating what changes might have occured.

Has anyone else seen anything simillar or knows how to fix it?

[Natobasso]

I don't know much about your issue, but have you checked your File Sharing to ensure you have it turned on? Maybe the settings were set to defaults when you upgraded?