Pen Drive Infected by Virus? Here is What To Do

USB Pen drives are the most widely used data transportation devices nowadays. Due to their small size, low cost and increased capacity of holding high volumes of data, pen drives are becoming more and more popular day by day.

But their is another fact that pen drives are most prone to virus infection than any other device. As all of us know that a pen drive is an external data storage device and commonly used to move or copy files among the computers, so connecting  to different computers make them more vulnerable to get infected by viruses.

The virus can change the attributes of your pen drive files and make the data inaccessible to you. In this article I’ll try to explain what to do in case your pen drive gets infected.

Clean up the Virus

If your pen drive has got infected by a virus, the first step you should take is to clean up that infection. To do this, insert the pen drive into a computer which has up-to-date antivirus software. Give a full scan to your pen drive and fix or remove all the errors which your antivirus software has detected. Hopefully, your pen drive should now have no infection in it.

Recover the data

The next step is data recovery. Virus might have changed the attributes of your data files, so as a result files may be in hidden or read-only mode or both. You need to change the attributes of files to bring back them into normal state as previous.

To do this, open the Command Prompt from the Accessories menu. Alternatively, you can type CMD in the Start Menu Search Box and hit Enter.

After opening Command Prompt window type following command next to the prompt :

ATTRIB -H -R -S /S /D G:\*.*

In the above command, G: is the drive letter for your pen drive. Do check with your computer if it is different then change accordingly. See the below picture on how to supply the ATTRIB command -

In the above command -

-h is used to change the hidden attribute;
-r is used to change the read only attribute and,
-s is used to change the system file a
ttribute.
/s is used to process all files in all subdirectories of the specified path,
/d is used to process folders as well.

Now, as soon as you hit the Enter key, your pen drive data should be visible and accessible to you.