Help fixing system that won't boot

[compdoc]

> help sending me in the right direction to fix this would be greatly
appreciated.

You should boot a live 12.04 cd you mentioned. Once you reach the desktop,
use the disk utility to read the drive's SMART info. That will tell you if
the drive has the problems. 

Or if you like, pastebin.com the output of the smartctl command so we can
see it. The command would be something like:

smartctl -a /dev/sda

Also, on the live cd at boot, theres a memory test you can select that might
tell you a little about the health of the machine. If after a few passes the
memory does not show errors, that might indicate the machine is ok.

There are other things to try, but start with those.