sorry, I'm not a big fan of initd. I do understand the point behind it, for example minimize resources but for the purpose of this it's best to start FTP as a dedicated service...

here's an alternative to INITD which starts ftp daemon as a standalone dedicated service.

# -D = Detach and become deamon
# -h = Passive mode

/usr/sbin/in.ftpd -Dh

The ftp accounts are controled via passwd (standard Unix authentication) ...

/usr/sbin/adduser ftpuser
# or whatever it is

I believe when logging into FTP you will default into your Home directory.
From there you can simply create soft links to other directories.

ln -s /mnt/hda1 /ramdisk/home/ftpuser/hda1