ubuntu taking too long to boot, constantly needs fsck, and often can't find the boot drive

I started having problems with ubuntu 18.04 forcing me to fsck the boot drive every other time I turned my desktop pc on. I figured maybe it's not supported anymore, so I went for 20.04. However it wouldn't let me upgrade or even apt update, so I had to do it the old fashioned way.

For a while, it behaved until I started getting fsck demands again, and sometimes I have to reboot several times just to get to the fsck request because it will freeze on a black screen while booting. Sometimes it would take over ten minutes to boot, only to leave me with reset settings that I'm locked out of editing.

Now, it won't even find my OS and is cycling "checking media presence". I don't get this, as the installation is on a wiped drive and less than 3 months old. I haven't messed around in the terminal, and the hard drive came with my pc, it's less than 5 years old.

I tried the dmesg command and almost everything was red, most of it saying that it was locked or something.

Possible reasons:

• Hard drive dying (most likely),

• Disk full, intensive swap usage damaging the disk(?),

• Bad install disk (edit, as suggested by @Jamie).

Save asap any important data, and consider replacing the disk.