I bought an e-machine tower for my brother last christmas (day after thanksgiving sale) for like 200 bucks, a deal that couldn't be beat. Anyways, I opened the thing up, and installed norton on it. when it rebooted, i got an error (i dont remember exactly what, i mean this was four months ago).

in the end, I have a seagate 160gb hard drive that does not work. when i try to use is master/slave, it starts up, clicks, then starts over. the cycle takes like 5 seconds or so. what could it be? something with the boot sector? i mean, like i said, it was brand new... and DID boot up fine once.

thanks!

New drives can fail or be DOA. Funny noises are not the best thing to hear.

Download the HDD maker's diagnostic utility ( Seagate's "Sea Tools Desktop" from http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/ ) - make its boot floppy or CD - boot to it and check the drive out.