Problem during boot - screen goes blank

[keta]

I just returned from vacation and to my surprise my computer does not work anymore. The first time I started it up, everything went fine until the login screen; there, I couldn't do anything so I rebooted and happened the same. I rebooted again, but from there on, it does not even get to the login screen. The screen goes blank halfway into the loading process, and my computer kind of freezes. I think it's not only the screen, because if the loading continued I would hear the login sound, I believe.

The same happens if I try to start the computer under Windows. At first I thought I was having some kind of overheating problem, but I tried an Ubuntu LiveCD and everything went fine. In fact, I'm writing this from the LiveCD right now. If overheating was the problem, sure I would still suffer from it with the LiveCD, am I correct with that?

I checked disks and Gparted returned no problems. I can boot Ubuntu in recovery mode, but I don't know what else to do. I thought of formatting everything, but it's the last thing I'm willing to do and I'm not positive this would solve the problem at all. Any ideas on what the problem is and what can I try?

[keta]

Looks like I was having a hardware problem... I checked the graphics card, which was were the the problems seemed to be, and I found a broken wire (the wire that powered the fan), so after fixing that and cleaning a bit the whole computer, it booted OK. I don't know if that was the problem, but it now works!