Sharing external hard drives

Hi folks,
I have recently started to use Time Machine and I own two Macs, a MBPro and an iMac. The external disks (two) are FireWire and formatted to HFS+, and stay connected all the time to the iMac. Both Macs are running Leopard updated to 10.5.6. The File Sharing is enabled on the iMac and I am able to see the disks on the MBPro connecting via Finder with an administrator account.
With that configuration I was able to turn on Time Machine on both machines and they both seem to be working fine. However, my issue is that the MBPro can only see the disks connected to the iMac when there is a user logged in that computer. If there are no users logged in, I can still browse the iMac's internal HD using MBPro's Finder but the external HDs no longer appear.
Any clue on how to make the external HDs available to the MBPro regardless of users being logged in the iMac?
Many thanks!
Bruno

No, the problem is not some users having access while some other not having. I am only logging via MBP's Finder with the iMac's admin account. Therefore, I do not need to have the external disks explicitly listed in the File Sharing on System Preferences | Sharing. (And, btw, I have just tested and it does not do any difference in my case.)
After a couple of testing, I found out that the complete problem is trickier than I initially thought.
When I boot up the iMac and log in with any user (doesn't matter admin or not), at this point the MBP can see all the external disks.
Then if I log out and stay in the login screen, the MBP no longer sees the external disk but continues to see the internal HD.
Now comes the tricky part:
If I log in again with the same user again (remember, doesn't matter whether admin or not), even after the login process is finished, the external disks remain unavailable to the other computer.
If I log in with a different user (i.e., different from the one that had just logged out), the other computer starts seeing the external disks again.
I am not an experienced Mac user nor I have knowledge of Mac OS internals, but to me this definitely looks like software bug in the OS... I hope it gets fixed in the 10.5.7.
Bruno

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