I want to thank all who replied with ideas, suggestions and theories. To recap-yesterday morning while burning a DVD the system starting giving a beeping sound, then shutdown and rebooted. Afterwards, no amount of playing, ordering, bullying, crying or physical violence could get it to do anything other than boot from a floppy. Thane suggested removing the battery and power overnight. I thought, "What the heck!" Well, this morning I was able to almost boot to windows! The system locked up during the process.
The GREAT news is I am now ABLE to boot to the cdrom and have spent the last couple of hours transfering all the files from the SATA and IDE RAIDs to a regular IDE hard drive. I think something on the mobo is toast. I am going to try a complete re-install later, but the first priority is the data. I learned a very valuable lesson. RAID 0 is a dangerous place to save data. I did not realize that the drives could not just be moved to another computer system like you can do with a single IDE drive. LESSON LEARNED! I will have to add another layer of backups or avoid the RAID system in my next setup.
Thanks to all that read and shared in my tale of misery. Perhaps I will get a somewhat happy ending after all. Thanks, Thane!
Jim Maki
