gnome-volume-manager not mounting external firewire drive

[CB]

As I understand it, gnome-volume-manager should just mount an external 
firewire drive without my intervention (have I got this right?).

On my Ubuntu (warty) installation, it doesn't. /var/log/messages shows 
the device being detected, and I can manually mount the drive OK.

However, if I run pmount /dev/sda1 once, from that point on the 
automounting does work (ie. I run pmount, the HD icon appears on the 
desktop, I unmount it from the context menu, switch the drive on again, 
and this time it does automount). This works until the next reboot, 
after which I have to manually run pmount again.

As a result I have a couple of questions:

- how can I troubleshoot the cause of this issue?
- does anyone know of any resources where I can read about how 
gnome-volume-manager works and is configured? I really feel I'm flying 
blind. There is a readme in /usr/share/doc/gnome-volume-manager, but 
that directly contradicts other advice I've seen, in that it claims you 
do need an fstab entry for removable devices (I don't have the entry, 
but I've tried one without success).

This is a rewording of an earlier post of mine. I'm asking again out of 
desparation because although I've now posted the question to several 
forums, there's been little information forthcoming so far. Is it really 
the case that only the developers know how this stuff works and is 
configured?

The problem is from my perspective that if this is a bug, then I'd like 
to log it, but I've no idea how to find out whether it's a bug, 
hardware/drive mismatch, misconfiguration or what.