>Evan, thanks for the greatly detailed response. Unfortunately, I'm in no position to try most of what you suggest, mainly because the only CD/DVD writer I have is on the bad system. Also the bad system has SATA drives an both of my others don't.

How about removing the drives from the RAID to eliminate that as a problem? There will be another connector on your motherboard that will connect just a single SATA drive. Then after adjusting the boot sequence order in the BIOS try booting with one, if that doesn't work try booting with the other.

If you want to save the repair shop costs, it might be worth it to transfer the burner to one of the other computers.

To access the the SATA drives from your other computers to copy off data, it might be worth the money to buy a SATA/USB connector for about $25. http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=17762