According to Only Ubuntu, to enable auto-mounting of internal drives on bootup, edit the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/preferences.fdi and change the line
<merge key="storage.automount_enabled_hint" type="bool">false</merge>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)to this:
<merge key="storage.automount_enabled_hint" type="bool">true</merge>Code language: HTML, XML (xml)From now on, internal drives should appear on your Desktop.