Help! Complete hardware failure

[tigerfootball05]

My computer has been acting up a ton over the past few months and I have no clue what to do. Most recently it has not been booting quickly (windows will show it's loading, then black screen for 5ish minutes, then I can hear it loading and the login screen pops up shortly thereafter). It will also freeze for no apparent reason even when running only one or two very light programs. Also, just today I clicked a shortcut to one of my media drives, and discovered that the drive had been completely erased (and the partition deleted)! Thinking back, I now remember that I could not access those files yesterday even though I could view them in the folder (media player said they could not be found).
I recently reformatted my computer (several times actually) so it can't be a software issue.

So what is going on here? Is my drive failing? Please help!

PS So i just remember this all began happening after my computer spent a summer in the trunk of a car...could the heat have messed with it (even though cpu temps are pretty hot normally)

 

[Ste]

Lets first check the hard drive.

Go
My Computer>Right click on C Drive>Properties>Tools>Error Checking>Check now>Place check boxes in both options>Start.

Then restart so it can do the scan.

Report what happens.

 

[tigerfootball05]

Lets first check the hard drive.

Go
My Computer>Right click on C Drive>Properties>Tools>Error Checking>Check now>Place check boxes in both options>Start.

Then restart so it can do the scan.

Report what happens.

Just finished doing this. Didn't see any alerts or messages afterthe scan (though wasn't in the room the whole time so i might have missed something), it just took me right to the login screen. After logging in I tried to open My Computer and explorer stopped responding...I'm at my witts end here. What is going on and how can I fix it?