On a laptop, attempting to boot up resulted in a brief error and return to the reboot sequence. Selecting safe boot, did not help nor did attempting to go back to a previously good boot.
At some point, I saw the inpage error message.
The problem was that somehow, the C: drive got corrupted. The D: drive (partition on the same physical drive) is used as a GateWay recovery partition and it was OK, so I know the drive itself was OK; just the C: partiton was messed up.
I did not want to re-install using the D: drive (by hitting F11 at boot). I used a bootable CD that boots into windows from that device that I had in my stack of recovery tools (see www.nu2.nu/). Perhaps a Dos boot floppy might do the trick.
Attempting to view C: showed just an error.
I then ran chkdsk /r from a dos window and it took about a 1/2 hour to complete, found several issues and after complete, I was able to view the C:\ drive. Reboot then succeeded as normal!