I did it!!!!! I lost 8 hours of my precious time, but I did it!!!!! So, what was it? drumroll............ A virus! I checked with my Avira Antivirus, nothing. Zonealarm, nothing. Some other free antivirus programs, nothing. I've tried ANYTHING that I could from Paragon Hard Disk Manager and Norton Partition Magic, fdisk etc but it only got worse. I *almost* lost my precious files. So what fixed it? SuperAntispyware program, which I stumbled on accidentely! The **** virus was called Rootkit.Agent and it was hidden behind drivers/services or something like that.