External Firewire Drives and Booting up

Good Morning,
   I have a Linux box with two external firewire drives hooked up.  The 
issue I am having is if I reboot or if we are hit by a power outage and I 
need to bring the system back online, it fails because it does not 
recognize the firewire drives.  The error message says /dev/sda1 is an 
invalid block device.  To fix this problem, I just make a copy of 
/etc/fstab and then remove the entries for the firewire drives, then reboot 
system.  After system comes back up, I then move the copied version of 
/etc/fstab back and do a mount -a and the firewire drives are again useable.
   This seems to be just a bit to much work since I have to do this as root 
and since I am the only person with the password it could cause problems if 
I am not here. (Everyone else has sudo privileges and there is no other 
sysad types here).  Is there something I can do where I can eliminate these 
steps and have the system boot naturally and mount the firewire drives 
during the boot process?

Thank you in advance,
Tom