M Paul says:

I'm having a major issue with my system right now

snip tales of woe

Before doing ANYTHING else, unplug or remove from the machine anything that is
not vital to it's start-up. As in :
Sound card
All disk drives/CD drives except the boot drive
Modem (if you use one)
Network card..

You get the piccie?
If a minimal set-up will boot, even though it throws "not found" errors around,
then you can start plugging stuff back in - one piece at a time only - until
the thing fries again. When it fries, then the last thing re-connected is the
culprit.

If that doesn't work, then and only then should you start tinkering with
multimeters and software.

My 0.02

Steve hasn't been a puter engineer since 1976, but has kept his own working
pretty well since then.