>>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.
>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

Evan, AFAIK Jim was using a *HW*-RAID. That alone would make me nervous trying to copy data off using "normal" SATA. I'ld hesitate to involve other adapters as simple as they may seem - sometimes they "hide" technical info from install screens, so I'ld keep it as KISS as possible<g>.

Jim: (sorry I didn't read every post<g>) if the RAID came with a SATA PCI controller, put that controller with the disks into your other machines. If the RAID is a mainboard device, use the "other clunker boot disk approach" from my last post - it is better then to get a "linux boot directly from DVD", because there may be problems with the RAID in linux drivers for SATA/RAID.

regards

thomas