Some viruses leave behind nasty side effects, even when your antivirus program has cleaned the actual virus from your computer. If your desktop icons are missing and your C: drive appears blank, don’t panic — your files haven’t gone permanently AWOL. Common viruses, such as the Windows 7 Recovery virus, will hide your files in an attempt to coerce you into paying for the virus’s removal. When you view your desktop or click on your C: drive, it may appear that all of your files have been deleted, but they haven’t — the virus has simply hidden them. You can restore them easily using a simple command prompt trick that works in Windows XP, Vista and 7.
Click the Start button in the lower left corner of your task bar. Type cmd in the search box at the bottom of the menu and press Enter. If you’re using Windows XP, click Run and type cmd into the Run box.
You will see this screen:
Type attrib -s -h -r c:/*.* /s /d and press Enter to execute the command. The command prompt window should look like this after you’ve typed the command:
Allow the command to finish executing (it may take a few minutes). When it’s done, close the command prompt window and check your desktop — your files, hidden by the virus, have been restored. You can use the same trick to restore files the virus may have hidden on other drives, including removable storage such as flash drives and external hard drives; just change the drive letter in the command above to the drive letter of the storage device with the hidden files.
~Jacqui Frye
Tags: command prompt, hidden files, lost icons, virus, vista, windows 7, xp
Hate it when the dissadents don’t claenup after themselves, namely ‘Wallstreeters’, but in this case what about this tip deserves a ‘thumbs down’, sure would be nice to know.
Good tip,
James
When I ran it, everything came up access denied
Same here … everything came up as “Access Denied – …”
This helped me fix a few computers and USB disks! Appreciate it so mcuh
I have tried several time, but it is still showing “Access denied”
Says ‘aatrib’ not a recognized command
what dose it mean -F:\*.* file not found?
For those of you that can’t get this trick to work, try running an elevated cmd prompt.
Click the “start” button, and in the search field, type “cmd”(without “”)
when the command prompt shows in the search results, right click and select “Run as Administrator”
This may help with the access denied issues
it says access denied.
Thanks m8. Gr8 stuff. Worked like clockwork. On first attempt. Much much appreciated. *Standing Ovation*
thanks a lot but while i tried that out using windows xp, an error message was displayed that ” Invalid switch – /s/d”
thx
any help reply to dainebyona@cit.mak.ac.ug
It keeps saying access denied.
Results on every attempts appears as “access denied” and is of no avail to me at all. Is there any steps that I’m skipping?
Doesn’t work at all.. Access Denied any suggestions?
it worked thankz
It worked even after showing access denied
It say Access Denied
It works… all you need is to know path where your device is… for instance if your flash disk is located on F:/… the you have to change your path form c:/ to F:/… Thanks a lot
it is a reliable source.
itz working.
thanks a lot.
if you are gettin access denied then find the command prompt in the system tools on the start menu and right click then select run as administrator and that should help