Wednesday, 6 June 2012

Files Hidden by Virus. How to Unhide Them?

My college was panicked when he found out his Project files were missing from his pen drive. He thought the files were already gone by a virus attack or were accidentally deleted by his friends.
After I did some analysis, I found out the files are still there but a virus had modified the file properties to ‘Hidden’ and hide all files in the pen drive.
Although he tried to “Show Hidden Files” but the virus does not allow him to view them. Luckily, he has a very intelligent and clever friend who guides him on how to overcome this problem.

The Solution

1. Insert the thumb drive to an empty USB slot. Take note the drive letter. For an example, F:.

2. Press Windows + R, and type “cmd“. Ok.


3. Enter this command,

attrib -s -h -r f:/*.* /s /d

4. Press Enter and wait for the command to execute.

5. Open the thumb drive and you should see the files that were hidden by the virus.


Hopefully this guide will solve your files hidden by virus problem too. BTW believe me, university is the best place for virus to spread!