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’!
A guy came to me asking how he can get his files & folders back after performing a virus scan on his external drive. I answered him: that’s simple, just make sure you have ‘Show hidden files, folder, and drives‘ checked under Folder Options->View->Hidden files and folders. Then go to the folder property and uncheck hidden. The annoying part is that, the virus has changed the folder ‘hidden’ attribute so it’s disabled and you won’t be able to modify it. The virus has modified the attribute of folders to be hidden.
To solve this issue, you will have to modify the folders and files attribute to restore them back to normal. You can do this easily by opening the command prompt (START MENU -> RUN. Type CMD and press enter). Go to the drive you want to work on e.g Type ‘F:’ and press enter. In the drive, type this command to restore all files and folders and press enter:
attrib -s -h *.* /S /D
That’s all! This command will restore all hidden(-h) files and folders (*.*) in that drive. You can also do this for a folder instead, by replacing *.* with the folder path(F:\\theFolder). See all available attribute you can work with by typing this command and press enter:
attrib /?
Finish!
Thanks for reading.