Sometime, we plug-in our USB drive to a virus affected computer and the virus also spreader to our drive. Later on, when we return to our own computer, the USB drive looked blank – just like it is formatted. If you are also a victim of such issue, no problem! Just relax and keep reading,

I am going to share a trick with you, through which you’ll got all of your files/folders back as it was before.

What is a “virus”?

A computer virus is a malware program that, when executed, replicates by inserting copies of itself (possibly modified) into other computer programs, data files, or the boot sector of the hard drive; when this replication succeeds, the affected areas are then said to be infected. Viruses often perform some type of harmful activity on infected hosts, such as stealing hard disk space or CPU time, accessing private information, corrupting data, displaying political or humorous messages on the user's screen, spamming their contacts, logging their keystrokes, or even rendering the computer useless. The defining characteristic of viruses is that they are self-replicating computer programs which install themselves without user consent.

Problem and its cause:

As I’ve stated above, that the viruses can corrupt data files and other programs, they can also just hide the user’s files. Due to this happening, a user thinks that his/her files are deleted but the space of that drive still remains filled; mostly happened with the removable media such as USB flash drives, memory cards, and other types of storage. It is because when a virus attacks a USB drive, it spread its copies to every folders inside the drive, as well as apply the “hidden” and “read-only” attributes to them so a user can’t see or change them. It means, all files are there, but not visible/accessible.

Resolution:

First of all, scan your drive with a good and updated antivirus program, so the existing viruses on the disk can be removed. afterward, To come out of this problem and recovering the files or directories from a USB disk drive, follow the steps below.

1. Plug the drive to available USB port of the computer, and wait for windows to recognize it.
2. Open the command prompt by going to run (windows+R from the keyboard), and then type “cmd” without the quotes and press enter or click ok.
3. Now you need to first navigate to the USB drive here. First type “cd ” without the quotes and hit enter (it will place you at the root folder), followed by “cd x:” and press enter, where’s “x:” is the drive letter, replace it with your own, (it will move you to the root of the drive you entered).
4. then you have to change the attributes on all files/folders on the disk back to its original values. For this purpose, type “attrib -s -h /s /d *.*” without the quotes and press enter. Everything should be done automatically – you don’t need to do anything. it won’t take so long, just 10seconds or so, depends on the number of files on the disk.
5. At the last step, close the command prompt windows by typing “exit” without the quotes and pressing enter.

That’s it, now you can browse to the USB drive from “computer” or “this PC”, all files and directories should now be visible to you as usual.