Thanks for the help, I paniced because I could not get emplode to sync at all with the changes I had made, I couldn't swear to it but I'm fairly confident the drives were RO, I re-booted the player a couple of times using Hijack and I think this mounts the drives RO in the process but I also think I did this manually as well.
Anyway I've had another go at installing Emptriv, no problems everything works OK, and for the moment Emplode seems to sync OK, however it hasn't tried to do the long file system check yet, fingers crossed everything seems to be working OK.

Thanks for all the help.....Mark.

Edit: I've had the emplode sync error again, this time I killed emptriv and tried again and the sync went OK. It would appear that emplode doesn't like emptriv running during a sync.