This is a tutorial on how to automatically mount your FireWire drive to a custom mount point on OS X 10.5 Leopard. Variants will probably work with USB 2.0 drives, and internal SATA drives, and probably for IDE drives for G4 or G5 Macs. For this, you will need a little familiarity with the UNIX side of OS X, and more specifically, with the Terminal application. You will also need to know how to use vi, I think (though there's a very brief primer included in this hint). If that is beyond you, then you probably shouldn't be reading this.
UUID=A740D396-D42D-3348-BD87-709342F87840 /my/mount/point hfs rw 1 0
/my/mount/point is the mount point you just created, and the string after UUID= is the UUID you found earlier. As a brief primer, here's how you do the above in vi. When vifs starts up, hit Shift-G to go to the end of the file. Hit the o key to go into insert mode on a new line. Paste in the above line (with changes as necessary, of course). Hit the the Escape key to get out of insert mode. Type in :wq to save and quit the vifs session (don't forget the : before the wq).Your /etc/fstab file will probably end up looking something like this:
#
# Warning - this file should only be modified with vifs(8)
#
# Failure to do so is unsupported and may be destructive.
#
UUID=A740D396-D42D-3348-BD87-709342F87840 /my/mount/point hfs rw 1 0
With your newly-acquired vi skills, edit or create the autodiskmount.plist file from Terminal:
sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist
If you get a blank file, then paste in the following into the blank file (emulate the vifs instructions from above):
If you get a file with some settings, make sure the value that follows the AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin key is <true/>. Study the above file to get an idea of how the final product might appear.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20080531040605723