G5 will not boot up. Is this a hard drive crash?

When I turn on my computer I hear the startup chime but it never gets past a gray screen with gray apple in the center with a spinning ball. After about five minutes, one of the fans also begins to go berserk and is very loud. I read that about a gray screen of death… Please tell me that this is not true!!!
I tried a few things like resetting the PRAM and the SMU restart. Nothing changed
I upgraded to 10.3 so do I try to boot from one of the 3 installation disks? If so which one?? or the original disk that came with the computer?
I know very little about troubleshooting as I have had very few problems with my computer in the past 4 years but this is a very big one and I fear the worst. Thanks in advance of any ideas.

Hi-
First, disconnect everything but the monitor, keyboard and mouse (use only the Apple keyboard and mouse).
Try and boot from the #1 install disk. When you reach the install window, in the menu bar, select utilities, and Disk Utility. Then, run repair on your hard drive.
If this fails, you will need to try a single user boot (startup holding "Command" and "S" keys, and run fsck (section 8 of the following). The following explains:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464#symp3
G4AGP(450)Sawtooth, 2ghz PowerLogix, 2gbRAM, 300gbSATA+160gbATA, ATI Radeon 9800 Mac OS X (10.4.8) Pioneer DVR-109, ExtHD 160gb x2, 23"Cinema Display, Ratoc USB2.0, Nikon Coolscan

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