Thanks, you guys have been a great help as usual
I assumed the drives were automatically mounted at a session start because I seem to remember writing to them but according to the fstab config I was wrong. Got the drives mounted and set for ntfs-3g and it resolved all my issues
and so, my long list of 'linux quirks to remember' grows 
I assumed the drives were automatically mounted at a session start because I seem to remember writing to them but according to the fstab config I was wrong. Got the drives mounted and set for ntfs-3g and it resolved all my issues 







Oh well.