I recently had a challenge of recovering lots of folders hidden by a virus on a drive. Some virus always hide files and folders in an external drive and create a new folder with an extension like .exe, .lnk and so on just to fake users to a malicious act. The truth is, most anti-virus will detect this virus and remove it, but it doesn’t return or restore the files and folders hidden by the virus. This is the ‘headache spot’!
Read my post on how to solve this issue @ http://blog.silasolatayo.com/restore-files-hidden-by-virus-on-windows-7/
I guess you missed the interesting thing about the virus. It doesn’t only change your file attributes to hidden and system, it also copies all content of the infected removable drive to your filesystem, thereby slowly chewing up your hard-disk space. You can find the actual folder somewhere in you AppData folder.
@micaleel
Thanks for your contribution. The whole antivirus process & cleanup wasn’t mentioned since the post focus was ‘How To Restore Files Hidden by Virus on Windows 7’.
I believe the use of ‘Microsoft Security Essential’ will help you solve all that.