First to reply to San9, the hard drive was dead so I replaced it and so far so good.
For AikiDave:
Was the NIC connecting before the hard drive failed? When you initialized it with Linux did you actually test the connection to see if you got anywhere? If the card in integrated with the motherboard then all the drivers should, be with the recovery CDs so you may be missing a CD with that driver. You may try going to Nvidia website to download directly from there or better yet go to the machines website:
http://www.emachines.com/support/pro...es&model=T3304
Good luck and let me know how it goes.
Deb