FireWire drive keeps unmounting when nobody's logged in

I have a Core Solo Mini I am using as a server for various purposes (shared iTunes and web server, with another partition reserved for Time Machine once Leopard comes out) as well as for normal desktop use for my wife and kids. The server partitions are all on an external 400 GB FireWire drive, since the mini's internal drive is so small.
[FWIW, I used to use a Cube in this fashion, but came up against its 120 GB limit for internal drive]
Anyways, even though I have it set to share the FireWire partitions via AFP, and even though I've pointed Apache over to directories on the FireWire drive as the root directories for various virtual hosts, the machine still has a habit of unmounting the FireWire drive if nobody's logged in and I'm not actively using the net-mounted drive on another machine (eg, if I'm not playing iTunes off of it).
When this happens, trying to browse its drives from another machine only shows the internal partitions, not the FireWire drive, and Apache barfs up errors like "document not found for /".
This kind of s*cks. Is there any way I can get OS X to never unmount the FireWire drive?
To answer the obvious question: yes, the mini is set to never sleep.
Thanks in advance.
--Chris
Dual 1.8 GHz G5 Tower, PB G4 1.33, G4 Cube 450 MHz   Mac OS X (10.4.8)  

I had a similar unmounting issue with one of my internal hard disks that I was using for nightly backups. I discovered that when no one was logged in the backup would fail. I have to look up the required fix to keep the disk mounted, someone here gave me the method for changing that default behavior with a simple terminal command. Don't have it handy with me right now, but I think this should be fixable by the same method for your FW drive. I'll post it later, if someone else hasn't before me.

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