Well, it was really an annoyance that your partitions weren’t mounted at start up. It does save some boot-up time but you lose your wallpaper unless its stored in your home directory. In order to auto mount the HDDs a non-techie way, you can go to:

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

Search for pysdm and click on the square and click on ‘Mark for installation’ and click apply. The package will be installed.

Alternatively you can go to Applications->Accessories->Terminal and type ‘sudo apt-get install pysdm‘. It will ask the password, enter it and pysdm will be installed.

Once installed,  type sudo pysdm in terminal to launch the application. After that, its pretty easy to configure the application to auto mount the partitions on startup.

Select the partition from the left panel, browse its mountpoint and in options, defaults will do. Defaults already have the auto mount option. Otherwise you can click on assistant to check the options you want. Do the same with all the partition and click on Apply and close.

Done. Simple, isn’t it?

There are other ways which require modification of configuration files but I found this method to be the easiest.

Cheers!