So today I needed to fire up Windows real quick to look at something. VMWare is unhappy about something or another, and ultimately it tells me that I'm going to have to reboot the Boot Camp partition. Well I was busy right then, so I ignored it until later in the evening. Started the reboot (man, booting into Windows seems SO SLOW these days) and wandered off to watch some TV. Came back, screen is black. (sigh) I'll skip over the painful diagnostics - something is wrong with Windows. Safe Mode works, but normal boot (as well as the "Last Known Good" configuration, aka "has this ever fucking worked in the entire history of this piece-of-crap OS?") just locks up somewhere before displaying a login screen.

This is where I'm going to gloat about the awesomeness of my backup strategy. Throw in the BartPE disc, boot from it, hit restore, wait about two hours and blam! The Windows partition is back to a "Last Known Good" configuration that actually y'know works! Windows boots up, doesn't even seem to know anything was ever awry.

Whew! Crisis averted.