Problems Booting PC

[yintong5]

Hi all,

I'm hoping somebody might be able to help me with a rather annoying problem.
I left my PC running today (emachines 620) only to come home and find it making a repetitive grinding sound as if a disk drive were stuck. There was no display at the screen.
After turning it off a few times at the wall (the power was coming on at the tower as soon as the wall switch was thrown and the PC attempting to boot up) it eventually started with much blind pressing of buttons, including the power button.
Once it ws alive I kept getting a message saying "Power Surge on Hub Port" which says "A USB device has exceeded the power limits of its hub port. I immediately removed modem, webcam and printer and tried to reset the port - which it wouldn't.
I then made the fatal error of turning the PC off and now, of course it will not boot at all - It tries to boot as soon as the power supply is turned on at the plug, either making that repetitive disk clicking or nothing at all, there is no external disk in either of the drives and the modem and other ancilliaries are disconnected.
If anyone has any ideas I would be very grateful - and please my friends, no emachines cracks, the old gal was bought on a tight budget and has given faultless performance for the last three years.
My thanks

[alfie2]

what do you mean, when you said the PC tried to boot?
any display on screen? [picture ?]
hear any fan running in the PC?

Clicking noise is usually made by a failing harddrive or sometimes a fan with too little power which means failling PowerSupply.

[flanzig1]

I think you have several problems. But lets start with the clicking sound(possible HD going bad). You need to run the HD makers diagnostic utility to check the health of the HD.
PC turning on when just plugging in the power cord is a sign that the PSU or mother board has problems with the turn-on circuits or the PC power switch is jammed or bad.

[glc]

and please my friends, no emachines cracks, the old gal was bought on a tight budget and has given faultless performance for the last three years.

You got your money's worth. Repair costs may be close to the price of a new entry level computer. If you have to buy a motherboard, power supply, and hard drive (and a new copy of XP because your restore disks won't work on a generic motherboard) that's getting pretty costly - more than the computer is worth. Yes, you can get exact replacement motherboards, but eMachines charges 4 times what they are worth.

Start with this:

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=168456

[yintong5]

First off, thanks for all your quick replies.
I'm completeley dumb to the hardware of a compute, but I've certinly narrowed the problem down (at least with thyis clicking noise: It certainly is not coming from CD or DVD drives or, it seems, from the Hard Drive. But this is where I come unstuck (or stuck, to put it more bluntly), The noise is coming from, it seems, behind the power on/off button (including HD light flashing with perfectly timed keyboard NUM/CAPS/SCROLL buttons flashing. Now, if I'm right these three keyboard lights come on for a short time during start up as well as the HD light going through it's motions. Could this be a simple matter of a defective switch I wonder as postulated by Flanzig1? (of course that could be wishful thinking)

You need to run the HD makers diagnostic utility to check the health of the HD.

You see, these are the sort of things I just don't understand, how do I run anything when the thing don't work? Sorry if this sounds weak and rather dumb but I'm really slow on this kind of stuff and really need to understand it better.

Charles Babbage......now there was a man whose stuff you could actually see working.

[flanzig1]

A quick test to see if the HD is causing other problems is to unplug the flat cable and the power cable from the hard drive and start up the computer. If the computer still starts by itself and get the flashing lights, probably a bad PSU or mobo. If it starts and goes to the BIOS screen, the HD is bad.