On several occasions we are called in to look at a computer that has been infected with malware or a virus. And the malware has hidden every file (and shortcut) on the entire hard drive. You notice this right away when you click on the START menu and nothing is there. And when you open the C: drive in Windows Explorer, you also see nothing.
I wanted to document this fix for this for my own quick reference and hope it can be of help to others as well.
From a Command Prompt use this command:
attrib -r -h c:\*.* /s /d
This changes the attributes of each file to not be read-only or hidden and does this for all files and folders including subdirectories.
Malware can also sometimes mess with file associations and leave you with inability to run EXE files or open documents or shortcuts. I found this great website with a ready reference of fixes for these types of issues:
Hi David,
ReplyDeleteCame here looking for answers. Seems the latest malware is getting harder to remove. Can not run rootkit removers. Combofix stalls I think on the rootkit scan.
Last computer I attempted ended up with corrupted files to the point of not wirth continueing. I backed up data and reloaded. At this time I found an OS2 boot partittion that may have been the real cause. Looks like it preloaded the code to reinfect at a later time.
Therefore... only sure fire way to knoe you are clean seems to be bare metal reload. I know it is a pain but only way I will be confident the problem is licked.