Edit: I didn't notice you didn't run SMART testing until after I submitted this post. I do implore you to try and do so, this is the ultimate determining factor on the drives current health. Here is a basic description of what SMART is and why it is important.
S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology; often written as SMART) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) that detects and reports on various indicators of drive reliability, aiming to anticipate hardware failures.
Here are the 4 tests that you can run using a program that can interface with SMART.
Short
Checks the electrical and mechanical performance as well as the read performance of the disk. Electrical tests might include a test of buffer RAM, a read/write circuitry test, or a test of the read/write head elements. Mechanical test includes seeking and servo on data tracks. Scans small parts of the drive's surface (area is vendor-specific and there is a time limit on the test). Checks the list of pending sectors that may have read errors, and it usually takes under two minutes.
Long/Extended
A longer and more thorough version of the short self-test, scans the entire disk surface, with no time limit. Usually takes hundreds of minutes, approximately one gigabyte per minute[citation needed] for modern drives.
Conveyance
Intended as a quick test to identify damage incurred during transporting of the device from the drive manufacturer to the computer manufacturer. Only available on ATA drives, and it usually takes several minutes.
Selective
Some drives allow selective self-tests of just a part of the surface. The self-test logs for SCSI and ATA drives are slightly different. It is possible for the long test to pass even if the short test fails.
Both of these are taken directly from Wikipedia, the only editing I did is to remove the notations, as they do not link to anything when copying and pasting. If you wish to read the page in its' entirety, you can locate it
here
Consider the rest of the post below as if you had ran these tests and they came back as saying you have a healthy drive, if that is indeed the case after you run them. You can skip these tests and proceed to the section below, but I highly recommend against it. Then of course, you can do anything you want lol, I'm just some random guy on the internet providing information
Ok. That tells us, basically, that your drive itself and the structure of the drive are both sound. Knowing this definitely helps in narrowing down what might be causing this. The next step is a simple disk defrag. Try running it and seeing how much of the drive is fragmented, if any at all. If this as well returns an error, look for the file named dfrgui in windows/system32.
I hate to say it, but this is feeling more and more like malicious software at work. To rule this out, the best way is to get a rescue disk of some sort. Bitdefender, Kapersky, AVG and many other popular names in the Anti-virus business offer rescue CD's at no cost. You can also turn it into a bootable USB drive, if you have one handy, instead of a CD. I would recommend downloading one of the bootable rescue disks from one of the developers, you should get an .iso file. To make a bootable CD, simply use Nero or any other CD burning program that offers burning an .iso to disk. This will automatically be bootable; the developers design the .iso that way. If you want to put it on a flash drive, I recommend using
Rufus as it is easy to use, and the website that link directs you to has several links to other sites that offer .iso rescue disks and other utilities. There are also two links to free CD burning applications there. Once you have made it bootable, the goal is to, of course, boot from it. Once booted, run a complete virus/malware scan of your C: drive. Yes, complete. Don't skip ANY steps here. We want to make 100% completely totally beyond a shadow of a doubt sure that 1) there is no malware causing this issue or 2) if there is, we stop it before more damage is done.
I would say use a malware/virus program such as malwarebytes directly from your desktop, but the trouble with this is the potential severity of what we could be facing. If this is indeed a worm/rootkit or another dangerous piece of malicious software, then by the symptoms that we are seeing here, it has found its' way into the windows directory somehow. This is the only clear malware-related cause of what you are experiencing, from my own experience. If this is the case, you cannot locate or remove the malware, as it is now a part of your currently running OS. The only way to identify such threats is to shut down the OS and scan it externally, I.E. from a boot-able rescue CD/USB.
I truly hope that one of these solutions yields some results, and please keep us posted.
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