Some of you might have faced this problem where you plug in the pendrive to your computer, copy some files and surely they are copied because the storage gets full and you can't copy more files to it, but when you open the pendrive you get nothing except a shortcut of the file or folder you copied. You don't need to format your pendrive straightaway, that way you will end up losing your precious data. Follow these quick and easy steps to get rid of this problem -
- Open Command Prompt.
- Type
attrib -h -s -r -a /s /d Drive Name:*.* - Replace the drive name with the drive name of your pendrive.
- Press Enter.
- Now you will see that there is a unnamed folder in your pendrive. That folder contains all your files.
- Copy that folder into your local drive and then format your pendrive.
Now the infected pendrive is ready for use again.
How it Works -
Basically, what happens is, a shortcut virus get into your computer and it starts changing the attributes of the files and folders on your storage devices and creates a shortcut of them due to which the original files become hidden and only the shortcut are visible. When you execute this command it changes the attribute of all the files present on the storage device, as a result of which a new folder appears which contains all your files. Formatting it erases the virus from the device.
Enjoy!
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Do you have any further details on the shortcut virus? Does it have a silly name or CVE?? I wanna look more into this.
Thanks.
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