I have a Samba server setup working on a Fedora 8 machine. There are several external hard drives connected via USB. This is all working well when logged in and mounted to the drives. But when logged out they (sometimes, not always) disappear from the Windows machines. Maybe no longer mounted on the Linux machine?

What I would like is for the Linux machine to power up with the drives shared via Samba and not require any user interventions such as logging in and/or mounting them. Can someone direct me in how to do this? Thanks.

Have you configures the drives in /etc/fstab, or are you relying on userland daemons (I.E. HAL/DBUS) to handle mounting them?

It sounds like you are doing the latter, in which case you just need to set the external drives up in fstab and the system will mount them at boot.