Vista - Vista hangs on boot-up

I was gone for the weekend and had accidentally left my laptop on . It had downloaded automatic updates and had been waiting for me to restart. My roommate noticed that my laptop was on and did a hard shutdown (holding the power key).

Now, whenever I turn on my laptop and tell it to boot into Vista, it just hangs on the olive green loading bar indefinitely (20 minutes is the longest I've kept it there).

I have tried booting into safe mode but it hangs after it loads "crcdisk.sys." I googled this, and found a plethora of problems, but no solutions. Also, I've found that this hang up can happen for multiple reasons. Nothing was really constant about it.

I believe, in my case, that it has to do with the automatic updates and the hard shutdown.

I have tried the "repair my computer," as well as "Last known good configuration" options to no avail. At first I thought it was a hardware issue, but I completely ruled that out due to the fact that I am able to boot just fine into Windows 7 on another partition of the same hard drive. I can also view all of the files on my Vista partition.

If this has happened to anyone, I would love to know how you fixed the problem. I really don't want to do a backup/reinstall if possible.

Specs:

HP Pavilion d2700t
250GB HDD
3GB RAM
nvidia 8400gs
Intel T2500 Processor (I think).
Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP1
Windows 7 beta

I did a recent repair install, followed by Windows Update.

Rebooted up till the login screen. As soon as I entered my password, Vista shut itself down.

At reboot, I got message "Windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause. Insert install disk and restart."

I restarted, tapped F12, booted from DVD. Used the "Repair problems that prevent Windows from starting" (or something similar).

It repaired in about 30 seconds, and everything was fine

Give it a try
.