naw. it's going straight to a black screen - not even a cursor, can't even get a list of boot options. 

the chkdsk indicated that the partition table was corrupted.

so, i'm going to do a startup repair. but the fact is that i know that these things don't actually work. scanning the boot database, whatever it is called, doesn't work. you have to rebuild it, and the only way to rebuild it is to reinstall it.

so, that's that next step - to copy the data off, reinstall to the drive (to fix the partition table) and then copy everything back.

there may end up being lingering registry issues if i do that (that's my experience in the past), but if i can at least get it to tell me where it's hanging, i should be able to go in and find it and fix it.

with a blank screen like that, my options are really minimal.