So, I have CrunchBang 11 and Windows 7 installed on to two entirely separate hard drives. Everything was working fine just like you'd expect. But today I started Windows, installed Skype and WhatPulse, used it for a while and then went back to Linux. I thought my CrunchBang installation was secure from Windows' evil claws since it is on another hard drive, but apparently... no.

Linux starts up fine. Then it attempts to start the X server and crashes hard. The terminal disappears. The background color changes to a slightly lighter black/blue. I cannot switch to another tty. In fact, I can't even toggle num or caps lock; everything is as dead as dead gets.
The exact same happens in recovery mode. I have a terminal, everyting runs smooth, but as soon as I run startx the system crashes the same way. It does not seem to matter whether I run startx as root or from my own account via sudo.

Before the X server actually tries to start a display I could see a quick flash of output to the console, so I recorded it with my phone... But there's nothing interesting there, just the usual startup/greeting stuff like version, build, host system, what log and config files are used... For example:
So I checked /var/log/Xorg.0.log... And guess what - it's completely empty, just like /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old! I have no idea how to get an error message. I even tried
but unsurprisingly that file also stayed empty.

What could I have done when using Windows that damaged my X installation on another physical hard drive? Is there a way to get a useful error message? Is the trouble not worth it and it's quicker to just reinstall?

Thanks a ton for your help!

May be the Windows Graphics driver changed some video firmware

or your linux install has corrupted.

Try using a Live cd to check.

You can simply start X and see what is reported on the console (that is not startx, but /usr/bin/X, the binary)
also there can be a .xsession-error file (or something like this) in the home dir.

It seems Windows was not the problem after all. I now have the same problem on my notebook that is running CrunchBang only. It seems like apt-get dist-upgrade caused the problem...

This does the exact same, I can't see any errors because the screen goes black and the system freezes

Yes, there is ~/.xsession-errors, but nothing is written into it. The file is not even recreated if I delete it.

By any chance , did you add a second monitor to videocard and setup dual screen ?
Nvidia drivers save config in old linux fashion like /etc/X11/xorg.conf and who knows , after dist-upgrade something went wrong
Is so , save xorg.conf to Desktop (any other place would be fine, just for backup sake) , then delete /etc/X11/xorg.conf and reboot

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I didn't set up dual screen or anything... but deleting xorg.conf worked! Incredible how that was able to crash everything so hard that it couldn't even log errors, I didn't think of something that simple. Thanks a ton, you saved me half a day of setup!