How to mount a second partition on start up?

[Albert Wagner]

Using Ubuntu 10.10. I have another partition that contains only data
that persists between different OS installations. I have replaced the
standard data folders in ~ with links to corresponding folders in the
data partition, e.g. ~/Documents is actually a link
to /media/data/Documents. Everything is OK if the very first operation
is mounting the data partition. What is a good method of having the
system mount the data partition automatically on startup?