Recover Hidden Files From A Virus Infected Pen Drive: A Guide

These days people store all their movies, songs, games, photos, documents and other files in the USB flash drives or the pen drives. Gone are those days when a floppy disk's storage had meant a daylong work in an office. CD and DVD became the next media to store the information but due to their physical vulnerabilities and relatively lower storage. Now-a-days, USB flash drives have become the most reliable storage for all sorts of works. With the advent of the latest technologies, viruses also begin to infect the flash drives resulting in a los  of data or storing corrupted data.

If a person has a USB flash drive infected with worms/viruses which hides the files and folders and create .exe extension of the stored data, it can mean a lot of loss to him/her. Here is a solution to restore the data in its normal form:

Step-I: First of all, plug the USB device to the computer and run the anti-virus software on the computer and make the files infection free. The files still do not show up in the flash device window albeit the properties of the drive show a space used to store the data.

Step-II: Open the Command Prompt window and type F: or I: or which alphabet denotes the external drive.

Here the flash drive is denoted by F:.

Step-III: Then type attrib -s -h /s /d *.* and press the enter key. Wait for the changes to happen.

Step-IV: Check the recovered files in the drive and verify their locations.

All the files are restored properly.