Understood! Thank you.
The Microsoft article you posted for me is actually one of the previous rabbit trails I bookmarked this morning for further pursuit. I dig in to computer issues decently (with online advice) , but I back away carefully when the screen turns to black and white. LOL I'll probably let my informal tech guru tackle that one.
Hmmm... I have previously backed this drive up to a set of DVDs. (that was a PITA, let me tell ya) When we started experiencing problems booting it up we tried to restore it from that set of discs. They wouldn't deploy. This time I have been trying to send the back up to an external Seagate 2Tb drive. So now I'm starting to wonder if it is a problem with the back up system. Of course, that wouldn't explain the failure to boot. Possibly two problems. I have a page of notes about as long as my arm trying to track all of this stuff down.