How to Recover Files that are Infected by the Shortcut Virus in USB drive/ Hard Drive / Pen Drive

Follow the instructions below and don’t worry if you don’t understand the technical jargons. Do this using the admin account on your computer.

Press the Window key and “R” key on your keyboard simultaneously. It will open the “Run” prompt. For those who are not aware, Run prompt is used to start any application by just typing the short name of the application.

So once you have opened the Run prompt, type CMD. Then hit the Enter key. CMD will open Command Prompt – a black window where you can type DOS commands.

Once you are in command prompt, type in below command.
ATTRIB -H -R -S /S /D J:\

Shortcut virus USB drive
Note: Copy pasting the commands from webpage may not be correct in some cases. If you want to copy paste, then do it on a notepad first and then check if it’s correct. Edit it on notepad if required and then copy paste it on the command prompt.

Important: The letter J denotes the letter of the drive that represents your USB drive or pen drive. It may change from one computer to other computer. So, first check in your “Computer” the letter that denotes your USB drive and according use it in the above command.

So that’s ATTRIB followed by space followed by hyphen followed by letter H then space followed by hyphen followed by letter R then space followed by hyphen followed by letter S then space followed by forward slash followed by letter S then space followed by slash followed by letter D followed by space followed by drive letter of your USB followed by a colon followed by backward slash.

Once you have keyed in the above command with correct letter of USB, hit the enter key.
That’s it. Just go back to your USB drive after a couple of minutes and you will see all the data back.
Take back-up of your data files (not the shortcut files) on your PC and then format the problematic USB. The shortcut virus should be gone.

Important: Do remember to take the back-up properly before formatting the USB
drive.
So this was the easy way to recover files that were converted to shortcut by the shortcut virus in USB drive or pen drive.