I searched all over this forum for an answer.

My problem started a few weeks ago when my computer started acting funny by freezing up occasionally and sometimes restarting by itself. This coincided with the fact that the fan on my graphics card was starting to make funny noises like it was having trouble spinning up. I also got a new external firewire drive for christmas that my computer was having trouble formating. My computer would all of a sudden lose the firewire drive while formating and I would have to reboot to find it again. Finally I managed to GET the drive formatted, then while I was copying files to the drive, it lost the drive and I decided to reboot to see if the computer would be able to find the drive again. All of a sudden my computer doesn't boot up at all. It gets to the dos command, loads memory, gives me my 2 OPTIONS of Operating Systems (I have 2 XP operating systems on 2 physically seperate drives), when I select the OS it restarts the computer. It doesn't work on either of the Operating Systems, which leads me to belive that it is not a failed drive or a problem with the OS itself. I can get into the bios settings and it seems to recognize everything.

I get the feeling that it is my Graphics card. I have an AGP Nvidia 256mb card, that fits in with my ASUS A8V Motherboard. I don't have any new hardware installed. The reason I thikn it is the Graphics Board is because of the fan issues I was having and now the fan doesn't spin up at all when I try to boot up the system. my system will not START up in safe mode as well. If it was my graphics board then why can i see the dos startup and Bios settings? I am confused and I don't know what i should try to fix first. I was thinking of just buying a new graphics card and hoping for the BEST BUT I am beginning to think that it might be something else. Any sufggestions on how to trouble shoot this situation, I just don't know where to start. And I would prefer to figure this one out RATHER then bring it somewhere for repair. Any suggestions before I go out and buy a new Graphics card?