HDD, DVD, other issues, possibly related?

Within the last few weeks I've had a slew of problems assaulting my desktop. I'll just sum them up in this list:


-The DVD drive is gone. Completely gone. It does have power and I can place a dvd in it, but it doesn't spin or anything, and Windows doesn't detect it at all. It's not in Explorer nor is it listed in Device Manager.

-I get Disk Boot Failure errors whenever the computer starts up. After several tries it eventually makes it through, though sometimes it freezes up as Windows is loading as well. I've pretty much stopped shutting it off for any reason. It's really unlikely that it's the drive itself, as it did this same thing several months ago and I've since replaced the hard drive I had then.

-The computer randomly locks up for seemingly no apparent reason. I'll be clicking on a link and suddenly the browser locks up, then anything else I have open will gradually lock up, then suddenly I won't be able to open anything else, and it will sit there, sometimes for more than an hour. The hard drive is thrashing like an angry shark taking down a sea lion, but the processor and RAM usage remain unchanged (like sea lions that aren't being attacked by an angry shark). Then out of nowhere it runs through everything I had tried to do as it was locking up and everything is back to normal.

-Finally, the hard drive access indicator light remains on constantly, though the resource monitor shows everything is normal.


Based on the fact that these are all happening at the same time, I'm thinking this might be a hardware issue, in which case I guess I should head on over to the desktop forum and try to find some help there, but if anyone has any idea how this could all be happening, let me know.

Thanks.

 

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