Inspiron N7010 - Operating System not found problem.

Hello all,

Hopefully someone one here can help me on this!

We bought my daughter's N7010 Inspiron from Dell Outlet about 18 months ago.  Up until now it has been running fine, but just recently she started complaining that it was freezing up on her and having to be restarted.  After a while, it deteriorated to the point where it frequently would not boot, just coming to rest on the 'Operating system not found' message.  At first, I could usually get it to boot by inserting the system disk, but it became progressively more difficult to persuade the DVD drawer to open, with us having to switch the machine on and off multiple times before the drawer light would come on and the drawer open.  Now we've reached the point where the machine won't boot at all and the system disc is trapped inside the DVD drive with the door refusing to open (green light not on) . 

The symptoms we have now are that when the machine is switched on, it runs through the Dell startup screen and stops on the 'Operating system not found' message.  Pressing F2 gets me into the setup menu and pressing F12 gets me to the boot menu with no problem but nothing I can do will make the hard drive or the DVD drive spin up which is making me suspect that this is a (partial) power failure.  I've also noticed that the machine is getting very hot very quickly (withing 30 seconds of powering up) in the vicinity of the CPU/Fan unit which again makes me suspect some sort of power failure.

I've even tried copying the contents of the system disk to a USB stick and booting from there - the stick is getting power but in that case I get  a message 'Incorrect system info - replace disk and press any key to continue'.

So my questions are;  Does anyone on here have an idea of what the problem could be?  Is it possible for just the hard drive and DVD drive to loose power?

Thanks in advance!