broken power supply?

im trying to diagnose my fathers pc, for some reason it cant start up. when i turn on the power, all the lights on the machine (harddrive activity led, cdrw leds, back side leds, power button led) all of a sudden start flickering and i hear some crunching sound. i think its the power supply, but what else could it be?

Crunching or clicking could also be a dying hard drive. Basically, mechanical sounds have to be from the hdd, psu, optical drives, or fans, since the other electronics are solid state. Of those, the computer shoudl still boot if it was a fan or optical drive. Does it make any progress starting up (POST beeps, error beeps, anything?) I'd try a new PSU though if you have one around.

yeah. slow help here in hardware forum i fixed this problem already. first i took the harddrive out, put in another one, still same problems and sounds. so then i took an older 270W PSU, put it in, and the computer boots up. but it pretty much froze to a halt due to lack of power when booting XP. after confirming it was a problem with the PSU, my dad picked up a new 400W psu, and it works fine.

Hey, it was only a day
Glad you got it fixed