How To Remove Pendrive Shortcut Virus From Your USB Drive and PC 💥📁💻
Channel: Hetman Software: Data Recovery for Windows
Date: 2017-04-13

👍 Watch how to recover your data if a virus creates shortcuts instead of files and folders in a USB drive, a disk or an SD, MicroSD, Mini SD, Compact Flash memory card. 

How to Remove a Virus Creating Shortcuts For Files and Folders in Pen Drives, Memory Cards and USB Drives (a Shortcut Virus): https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_news/how-to-remove-virus-creating-shortcuts-to-files-and-folders.htm.

Contents: 
0:00 - Intro;
0:51 - The virus replaces the USB drive icon with a shortcut
1:10 - What to do if you get a virus
1:57 - Unlocking files from the command prompt

If you can’t find your files and folders after you have copied or created them, don’t worry - they may have been hidden by a virus, and you’ll be able to have them back.
usually such viruses create shortcuts on a USB drive which replace your files and folders. Unlike icons of real files, shortcut icons have a small arrow in the corner, but a novice user may not see this difference. Connecting a USB drive to the computer and starting the file you have used many times before, you can easily infect another computer if it doesn’t have an antivirus.
A virus can also replace the USB drive icon with a shortcut - you can see it from that little arrow. Don’t click on the USB drive, file or folder shortcuts to avoid infecting your computer. If your PC is already infected, watch our video about finding and deleting viruses - https://youtu.be/afhEVwsHmgw
What should you do if you have this problem? Today, there are viruses capable of deleting, encrypting or hiding the information on your drive. So the first step should be to recover your files and clean up the drive immediately. Watch our video to see how to recover data deleted from a USB drive by a virus attack - https://youtu.be/O3hSEyU2DFg
Then you have to clean the drive just as we showed in our video about fixing a USB drive (you can find the link in the description -https://youtu.be/thqtMqLKaS4). I would like to point out that simply deleting shortcuts from the flash drive or formatting it will not clean it from viruses.
If you scanned the USB drive for viruses, your files can also be deleted or placed into quarantine by the antivirus. So I recommend checking it too.
You can unlock the files infected by a virus with the command prompt. This method cannot clean your USB drive from all kinds of viruses for sure, but it can sometimes help you to make the files visible again. For this purpose, do the following:
1. Right-click on the Start menu and click on Command Prompt (Administrator).
2. Enter the command f: and press Enter (f: is the letter of the USB drive infected by a virus).
3. Enter the command: attrib f:*.* /d /s -h -r –s and press Enter:
a. –h: shows all hidden files on the flash drive;
b. –r: disables the read-only setting;
c. –s: disables the system mark from all files.
4. The lost files which became visible on the flash drive after execution of this command can be copied to another media. After that clean the USB drive with the method I recommend using the Command Prompt and the command “clean.” 

If you liked this video, click the Like button below and subscribe to our channel to see more. We’ll be glad to answer any questions in comments. Thank you for watching and good luck!