OS X Network

I have two macs. One is a laptop and one is a mini. The mini has not mouse, monitor or keyboard. I control it with VNC. This works out great 95%-99% of the time. Except for last week when it didn't. I told the Apple Updater to do some install it wanted to do and the computer didn't come back on the network. I hooked up the computer to a video projector and discovered that it wasn't booting. The round sunburtsy thing it does during startup was just going and going and going.

I borrowed a mouse and keyboard and re-installed the OS from a 10.5 disk and then re-enabled Remote Management and then installed all the updates, etc and it works now. What a pain, though.

And, also, there's a slight difference. On my laptop, finder windows have a left-most column which list the drives on my computer under "devices" and "places" and "search." There's also a section called shared and it shows my Mac Mini. If I click on that, I get a big icon of the disk and two buttons. One says "Disconnect" and the other says "Share Screen." Below those are a list of shared directories and drives. Before my computer had it's troubles it listed the external firewire drive in the list. Now it does not, but still has the internal drive, my home directory and shared folders on the internal drive.

I've gotten addicted to doing network file transfers via drag and drop, and now I can't get to my data disk? I have no idea where one would configure it to show up. It was not a shared disk, I just had access to it because I was logged in as me. Why has it gone away? How do I get it back? Woe is me! What search terms do I type into the help menu? I'm stuck!

Edit

According to some help file someplace, since I'm connected as an admin user, I should have access to the entire computer. Bugger it.