Booting problems

Hi all hope you take the time to read this. I have spent hours googling but to no avail.

I'm on my dads very new 27" iMac running 10.7.2.

On the 2tb internal drive is a 100gb partition made by boot camp (against my better judgement) which has windows 7 installed on it.

Installed on the mac partition is Vmware Fusion 4 which is able to access and boot from the Boot Camp partition.

This was all working fine together at the start. Recently I noticed that when rebooting into Mac it was taking longer. It would then reach the login page and while the mouse would move it would not allow a user to be selected or the power icons at the bottom of the screen to be pressed. A hard restart fixed this.


Yesterday I left windows on overnight and woke up this morning to find dad had tried to restart into mac. He complained about it taking him an hour bla bla bla don't do it again etc. How he restarted I don't know but I doubt it was the proper way.

Anyway, I decided to try rebooting. The 'normal' thing happened where it froze on the login page and wouldn't allow anything to select but now restarting didnt make a difference. After many restarts I left it for a while and to my joy after 2-3 minutes the screen 'flashed' then the mouse button worked. This is how I have to log in now.

So mac log in isnt ideal, but at least I can use the computer.

Windows, however, now won't do a thing. At first I thought it must be a virus or something but VMware still works fine. What I've narrowed it down to is the startup manager. The thing that opens when holding down option during startup.

The screen now takes a looooong time to load. After loading, I can select which disk I want, press enter, then nothing. At all. I can move the mouse but cant change the startup disk. It just stays on that screen indefinitely. Doesn't matter whether I try to start mac, windows or the recovery HD from that screen none will load.

I have no idea what this means or how to fix it. I'm also hoping it is somehow related to the log in screen problem I'm having.

If it was my comp I would back-up and reinstall but unfortunately that is a very very last resort (dads computer and as mac is working he doesnt care) and I am hoping one of you geniuses has an easy solution that i just cant see.

Thanks in advance and sorry for the length.

 

please help me anyone?