I've had a slew of other things going on, so I haven't been able to concentrate on this just yet. Maybe if the little lemurlings give me peace this afternoon. I will say, however, that all my troubles began after mocing my hard drives from an upper to a lower cage (making room for my new baby). I have a two HD system, like most gamers I expect, but neither SATA cable was unplugged or re-plugged at the motherboard. Like any lazy slob, I just disconnected the headers at the HD, moved the drives, and re-plugged them in, paying no mind to which had been plugged where originally. They are on the 1 and the 2 SATA channel, respectively.

If I can ever convince this PC to boot from a CD again, I will try to see if a FIXBOOT will do the trick, as per Xiahou's suggestion.