What is wrong with my computer?

[Civis-Romanus-Sum]

The other day I tried to start it up and a couple seconds after I did I heard this loud horrid noise coming from the tower. I quickly turned it off and a few seconds later tried to restart it but it just went to a black screen saying something about an unpluged video imput cable or something and to insert the boot disk. There are no unpluged cables that I can see and I tries all the disks that the computer came with, one that I am pretty shure is the boot disk, and none worked. Can anyone help so I won't have to drag it to Best Buy?

P.S I am on a school computer if anyone was wondering how I wrote the post

[paokmam]

The other day I tried to start it up and a couple seconds after I did I heard this loud horrid noise coming from the tower. I quickly turned it off and a few seconds later tried to restart it but it just went to a black screen saying something about an unpluged video imput cable or something and to insert the boot disk. There are no unpluged cables that I can see and I tries all the disks that the computer came with, one that I am pretty shure is the boot disk, and none worked. Can anyone help so I won't have to drag it to Best Buy?

P.S I am on a school computer if anyone was wondering how I wrote the post

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[HouseOfHam]

Have you tried opening the case? Maybe an IDE or power cable came loose and got caught in a fan or something... Or maybe the motor in the HD fried due to overheating, or who knows what else might have happened.

In any case, it doesn't sound like you have much experience with this sort of thing, so taking it to BestBuy is the best thing to do.

[Brusilov]

It almost sounds like you fried a video card. As HouseOfHam has posted if you don't know your way around a PC it may be best left to someone else.

You can always open up the tower and have a look inside. Make sure you ground yourself (touch some metal) before you touch any of the internal components as otherwise the static you have may make a mess of the components.

If your PC came with on-board graphics you could remove the existing card and try to run using them instead of the video card.

The other thing to look for are dust clogging up the fan etc. Again be very careful when removing dust. I use a 'blower belows' which I bought for my camera.