At best, I'm an amature at working on computers but I've never had any kind of issues installing hardware or trouble shooting before. However, I recently moved and when I hooked my computer up it couldn't find a connection with my HDMI, VGA, or DVI cords and thus the monitor wont come on.

I took stuff out, reinstalled it to no avail and Best Buy is telling me that my hard drive fried because it couldn't handle my graphics card. Before I even bought the card, I bought a new power source for it and had no trouble except the occasional black out and it told me that for some reason my video card had failed but the pc was able to recover, which was odd to me but it only happened once in a blue moon and usually was a result of not having the cable in good.

The computer boots, the power source turns, the fan on the motherboard itself turns on and theres even a little green light on the motherboard thats on too so that leads me to think its not fried, cause it appears that the mother board is indeed getting power but I don't know for certain.

any ideas or help? I figured I had a video card fail at the worst, but I don't have a seperate video card apart from the graphics card. Could that be it?

So they said your hard drive and motherboard is fried?

mistake on my part, no, just the Motherboard.

Does the motherboard have an integrated graphics? is that what's not working? Or is it that you have only a discrete GPU with no integrated GPU? Sorry, your wording at the end has me a bit confused.

I'd never trust anything best buy says, though.

Also, the problem with your GPU you described is known as a TDR failure, it commonly plagued nvidia GPUs released between late 2010 to late 2011, and also was driver-related in many cases. If this is all, then just replacing the GPU will fix the problem.

This is why I refuse to get a motherboard without onboard graphics, so if anything bad happens with the GPU it's only a few minutes of downtime before my PC is back up and running.

I don't know that I could tell you if it does or not. Like I said, I'm really an amature at this and it could easily be my problem. Best Buy couldn't tell exactly what the problem was, but they said it was the motherboard; I just find it hard to believe since everything powers up. If the motherboard didn't work I would think I wouldn't get anything out of it.

As for getting another GPU, if that was the issue, is it expensive?

Take a picture of the back of the desktop where you plug all the cables in. I'll tell you if there's an integrated chip or not

If it's just a dead GPU, then it can be as expensive or cheap as you want, and it seems to be the problem. Of course if you have an integrated graphics chip, you can just use that and not even have to get a new GPU.

That depends entirely on what you buy.

You would not be able to find a slightly old/lightweight GPU more expensive than $100, but anything relatively powerful that has been released in the last two years would likely cost you at least $200.

Thank you for all the help! I'll snag a pic first chance I get!

Keep in mind that most of the geniuses at Best Buy couldn't tell their ass from a SATA cable, so take anything they tell you with a very large grain of salt. Also keep in mind that motherboard problems can be very difficult to diagnose, and are often only diagnosed by the process of eliminated all other components as the possible source of a problem. Since it doesn't sound like you're getting any kind of error codes when trying to boot (either beep codes or an error code on a motherboard LED display) there's quite a few other things you should be checking before you consider the motherboard the source of the problem. From the sound of it you've already eliminated a bad cable as a possible problem; the next easy thing to check is if for some reason your monitor has crapped out (find another monitor and try hooking that up). The next easy thing to try is to move your graphics card to a different slot just to rule out the possibility that the slot it's in has stopped working. And as DEFRON suggested try hooking up your monitor to the integrated graphics port if your motherboard has it (this will tell you if the problem is with your GPU). If all those things fail to give you a graphics signal then the troubleshooting becomes a bit more tricky. One thing you can try is booting up your computer, then listening closely to see if you can hear the hard drive spinning up, or any other sounds that are customary when starting up your computer. This could give you an idea of whether it's a simple graphics issue you're dealing with, or if you computer is failing to POST. If it's the latter then the possible problematic components are as follows: RAM, motherboard, processor, PSU. RAM is the easiest of these to check, at least if you have multiple sticks. Pull all but one of the sticks, then try starting up the computer with that stick in at least two of the RAM slots (to ensure it isn't just a problem with the specific slot). Repeat this for each of your other RAM sticks (it's highly unlikely that all of them would have failed simultaneously). If you still haven't found the problem then distinguishing between a motherboard, processor, or PSU problem can be very difficult if you don't have components to swap out. You can try visually inspecting the components for signs of damage, such as burst or bulging capacitors, or singe marks; also smell for any burnt electronics smells. If you still don't have any likely candidates then you're going to have to start swapping out components based on guesswork- see if you can track down a replacement PSU and processor (hit up your friends if necessary), and if swapping out these components don't do anything only then can you say with a fair amount of confidence that you're probably dealing with a motherboard problem and go about replacing it.