Let me preface this by saying I'm primarily a Unix and Linux guy... this may be a stupid question to people who work with Windows more than I do:

This morning, I went to shut down my 4780, and it hung. This happens a lot, actually... I have one app that seems to keep the machine from shutting down unless I close it first. Like a bunch of times before, I gave it a couple minutes, saw no drive activity, and pressed the power button.

When I got to work today, though, Windows would no longer boot. The machine starts up, I get my bootscreen, then it reboots. Fortunately, the Linux half of the machine still works fine, or this thing I'm typing on would be a paperweight until I get home.

I currently have read-only access to the Windows partition under Linux, so my question is: is there somewhere I can look to try to troubleshoot why this is happening? And, if the machine won't boot into Safe Mode, any tricks for getting Windows going again?

This problem doesn't even really qualify as annoying -- I'm just looking at it as a learning experience. For that reason, what I'm *not* looking for here is "reinstall Windows." I'd really like to do what I can to find out what's going wrong, rather than just slapping a new copy of Windows over the old one.

Any log files I should try digging in? Any troubleshooting tools that might help? Should I just blow away the Window partition and try to forget it ever existed?

See if you can go into safemode/try lastknown first.

If that no go got to the recovery console by booting to the windows xp cd.

type chkdsk -R

to repair the boot partion.

Well, no dice there, but thanks... Didn't know about the recovery console.

I'm really giving serious thought to just blowing Windows away on it... I'm not used to OS's that use reinstallation as a troubleshooting technique.

Was you able to run chkdsk -R? it takes about 40 mins to run.