Computer won't boot - video problem?

this is long.  perhaps it didn't need to be this long.  Please read it anyway.

So, I have a Radeon AIW 8500DV, on an ECS K7S5A board, Athlon XP 2000+, 1 gig of RAM, blahblahblah. Connected to a lovely mitsubishi LCD, the model of which i couldn't tell you at the moment, since I'm at work and it's not.  Running Windows XP SP2

Anyway, my problem.  I was in Windows yesterday, watching a video (the card was in theatre mode, so i saw my desktop with the windowed video on my monitor, but full screen video on my tv).  Suddenly, the computer locks up, and the display is distorted hardcore so that it looks something like this.

http://i17.photobucket.com/albums/b62/xandir/050804-0043.jpg

I thought "hey, that's lame" and rebooted.  The system hung during boot, with a black screen.  Rebooting fixed it.  It worked okay for a while, but in the process of that crash, an external drive had gone wonky. (It's not relevant to the problem in question here, but is necessary to mention, for timeframe).  I mucked around with it for a while trying to fix it, and then the video fucked up again.  Booted back into windows no problem.

At this point, I decided I needed to jump into knoppix to fix this drive, so I booted from my knoppix live cd, and did stuff for an hour or two (it's about 4 hours since the original graphical distortion/system lock up).  While running dosfsck on the drive, the system hung and the display distorted into those vertical lines again.  Rebooted back into knoppix, no problem.  Decided after a while that I needed to be back in Windows, so I rebooted.

Then it all hit the fan.  First, I could get the XP loading screen, but when it tried to load the Welcome screen, it would hang, either with a black screen, or with those vertical lines, or sometimes "check boards".  The more I tried to reboot (hoping it would randomly work at some point), the faster this crash/distortion occurred.  Next, it would happen when switching to the XP loading screen.  Next, it would happen immediately after the memory test.

I left the computer off overnight, and tried again.  I thought maybe the video card was just overheating, as it was hot, and the computer had been on all day.  This morning, I tried again, this time booting into Knoppix.  It got as far as loading my window manager, and then the screen blanked and the system hung.  After that, it was always mid-boot at best, immediately after the memtest at worst.

So, my question to you: wtf is wrong?  Did my AIW crap out magically?  Is it a mobo/RAM problem?  Is it just heat, or is the card actually fucked?

I can't find anything on google, most things with "Vertical lines" end up being display corruption, but they can still boot up, and stuff. If I could do that, I'd be so pleased, right now.

Anyway, thanks for your help.

Hm. The bad block thing isn't something to worry about, a "bad block" could be something mundane caused by failing to halt the system properly before powerdown.

In this situation, the time has come to begin testing each piece of hardware independently. It's time to get a geek buddy with some spare hardware to help you out. You're gonna want to try a new video card, a new hard disk, different ram, etc.

If your system supports booting from your external drive, first try removing your internal hdd and booting from something on the external drive. Disconnect all nonessential IDE devices, up to and including your floppy. If that doesn't do anything, remove all your RAM except one stick and try that. Then swap that stick for the other one and try that. Then remove all nonessential PCI cards.

At this point concede that your computer is fucked enough to warrant a reinstallation of the OS so kiss your pr0n goodbye. If this is unacceptable, I hope you at least have a computer repair store nearby that can test your equipment.

Some consolation at least is that there's no reason to suspect your video card any more than any other piece of hardware in your box.