Hello everyone! First time on the forum, but it looks to be quite helpful, so I thought I would give it a shot.

I've got an emachines DESKTOP CPU

T2482
AMD Athlon XP 2400+
CD-RW
DVD
1.25 DDR (stuck in a GB)
128? MB NVIDIA card
80 GB Hard Drive (Ultra ATA 100)

It had gotten to the point of uselessness in the past, and I just put it in a closet and pecked away on my laptop. I started thinking about getting a new desktop, but SAID heck, let me try reformatting the emachine.

So, I stuck in a fresh XP SP2 and reformatted. All was going well and thing was acting like it was brand new. I was so excited, I stuck on a couple free security features (AVG, Spybot, etc.) and put on a version of MS Office Enterprise. Even had the thing on my wireless network.

Well,before I went to bed last night it said I had to restart it for the effect of all my changes to take PLACE. I'm really bad about installing several things at once or many functions and holding off on the restart until I feel like I am at a point that I can take a break...

Turned it off, went to bed, and hoped to crank it up and get some stuff done. It was not to be though. IT pulls up the eMachines logo, all the while MAKING this sound like it is cycling power ever 3 seconds, but its not. kind of a high pitched noise. Then something flashes for less than a second and it goes to a black screen with a blinking dash in the top left corner.

The sound stops and it stays like that until I tire of looking at it. And now, it goes through the same process when I put the XP disc in.

Any thoughts on what I did and what I can do?

Thanks in advance!As an update, not it is sounding more like "click-click, click-click, click- click, click-click" then makes the repowering noise. This occurs on a 4 second loop or so with the eMachines logo stuck on the screen.

Additionally, the sounds seems to be coming from the area of the hard drive, but maybe I am just hallucinating.

And I'm starting to think that when I was reformatting on the first occassion I heard a similar click from the same location, minus the "power cycling" noise.

Sorry for the newbie descriptions, but I don't know another way to convey the problems...Unfortunately that clik clik is what's known as the "clik of death" and it means your hard drive is failing...
The more you try to use it the further your data gets away from possible retrieval.
You'll need to replace the drive and re-install your OS and programs.

After doing this you can hook up the failing drive as a slave and see if you can get the data off of it...but as i said the more you use it like this the less chance of that working.Great... It was reliving its golden days for a minute though.

Thanks PATIO!

I'm waiting to chat to someone on the emachines site and i am sure they will tell me the same.

While I'm at it, I saw that you suggested to someone that they replace the PSU when trying to revitilize a stock emachine. I was thinking about doing that because I remember crashing the thing in the past for lack of power (maybe that's why they don't put a fan in the case haha).

Should I have a mininum wattage that I am looking for, assuming that I am only going to add a case fan to the current load?

Or, to do a 180, should I rip out and sell what I can and start anew from a barebones kit?