Help

The good ol " faint tick "

Unfortunately this does not bode well. Either your phone line is dead, or your modem is faulty.
Disconnect the phone line from the modem, and plug it into a phone handset, do you have a dial tone ?? If not, get your line checked.
If you have a dialtone, but there is still just a faint tick, its more than likely the modem which is faulty. Tailing the messages log will confirm this.

tail -f /var/log/messages

Check for anything which mentions "No Dialtone"

If you modem is faulty, you will be able to connect a new one very easily. Just plug it into COM 1 and it should work fine, no loading of drivers necessary.