So I've noticed when running Ubuntu that while my external drives will show up on my desktop when I turn the computer on, my internal drives don't. They were still accessible from the Places Menu, but they had to mount on the first click, and then I could open them. Obviously, this is not the desired behavior. So I did a bit of digging and I found the problem. HAL apparently tells gnome-volume-manager not to auto-mount internal drives. I found the file containing this policy, and fixed the problem.

The file is this one:

/etc/hal/fdi/policy/preferences.fdi

sudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/preferences.fdi

To fix it so that internal drives will show up on your desktop when you boot up, change this line

true