You're doing OK JT.
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When it boots up I get a different message, and suggesting to back up everything important. I then hit F2 (the only key it prompts to use), then I get the screen showing all different kinds of thing,
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Sounds like a dying hard disk Dave.
A bit late now, but a couple of interesting points -
1stly, your Linux versions are booting with a splash screen covering all the important boot information. You can switch to viewing the boot sequence text by pressing ALT+F2 during the bootup. Then it won't disappear so quickly and you can get a better idea of where it is failing.
2ndly, The Linux boot process is usually a little more in-depth than Windows so will test and report failures for things Windows may miss. As JT says, if you can access it, the boot.log should have the messages logged.
3rdly, in the case of failing hard disks, if a dual boot system is on seperate physical disks, one O/S may boot up fine and the other may fail if one of the disks is dodgy.