Thanks so much guys.
Last night I shut my computer down for that earth day thingy and it would not come back up. I finally got a backup machine up and running just now. Fortunately I did not lose any data but what a royal pain in the ass and a loss of about eight hours. iMacs are not all that easy to disassemble in order to extract a hard disks. But at least I am back at it. Now all I have to do is fix my original computer. Even though it was mean to me I still am fond of it.
Thanks again for the kind thoughts.