Hi there,

After wondering why my read speeds were so woeful for my R5D1 system i found that apparently my harddrive was a SATA one and not an ATA-100 one as advertised (thank you ebuyer).

So with no luck from 'hdparm -d1 /dev/hda' i guess im going to have to recompile the kernel, however i am brick scared of doing this as i really wouldnt even know where to begin being as i am a linux noob.

Is there someone out there who can help me - its been three weeks now and i still havent gotten my mythtv system up and running

Enable/disable DMA is not an option for SATA drives. It's essentially "always on".

BTW - I'm assuming that you've actually looked at the drive itself and seen a skinny SATA cable... Which looks like this: SATA Cable Rather than like this: PATA Cable

Take a look at this post,

Slow hibernate and resume
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14046
It looks like you need to turn on DMA and add LZF support in the kernel

you may need to post a question there.