>Thomas and all,
>
>I don't have such a CD. Only Windows install CDs.
I have saved them since they were in a few of the magazines I read. When the concept of ultimate boot CD came out, I even bought a magazine I usually DON'T read <g>. So drive up to the nearest well loaded magazine store, (airports or main train stations often do the trick) and look if you can find one. If that drive is too far, phone those buddies of yours who are still interested in HW or have their notebook case always equipped with spare cables, screwdriver and so on.
The link Evan pointed to looks very promising, but I'ld go that route only if no pre-pressed (and thereby closely virus-checked) alternative disk can be found.
>
>I did re-arrange the boot drive sequence, putting the CD first. Still no joy.

No secondary machine in the house ? Evan also reccommended plugging your disks into another machine for backup purposes. Another way to accomplish this is to get an old HD, ( I have kept an 11 Gig "snail" just to be able to install a fresh instance of any OS I want) unplug the RAID disks, use the clunker to get a bare system running and *then* recconnect the old drives as additional drives. GREAT for testing purposes, no danger for your data.

If reinstallation on a wiped clunker doesn't work, it is probably a hardware issue not on the disk side but somewhere on the mainboard - get it fixed but probably your data on the disks is still sound <bg>. But the main trick is to separate the disks from the system and check then where the error is.

>The RAID is hardware and bootup reports it to be operational.
What was the your motivation for a RAID1 system-partition ? IMHO that doesn't make it safer, but more risky as the boot itself could be fragged. As you were not interested to bench for optimized reading pattern I doubt it was for speed issues. I am always for more spindles, but for me it is JBOD (just a bunch of disks) with external backup and sources, documents and important tables and spreadshets in Source Safe on another box. I have 2 disks software-0-RAIDed, but this is ONLY for foxpro cursors and other temporary data.

>Off to the shop tomorrow.
Think about keeping your disks at home unless you are allowed to watch the operations! Most shops have small print that will absolve them from liability to your ***data*** - imagine how happy you would be if they tell you that after zero-overwriting twice they were able to create shiny new partition tables and they reset the machine to the XP config after factory install. I am not sure you would be able to plead justified manslaughter succesfully<bg>.

Hope it works out (and get some boot disks anyway !)

thomas