Clear Recycler Virus on Thumb Drive

Lately there has been this virus that has been making rounds in the place where TechieDan has been working. His flash drive has been infected with this so called Recycler virus that only shows the shortcut of the folder he previously saved.

Instead of downloading countless antivirus or malware removal programs, TechieDan will now teach you the manual way to solve this virus. This virus affects all USB storage devices. For simplicity cause, the term flash drive would be used instead.

What does this virus do?

It hides all your folders and also disables the folder option in Windows to unhide it.

Hidden Folders

It creates an autorun.inf to change your folder and also to run the program to keep hiding your folders.
It creates a few folders that are hidden to store those programs which use the autorun.inf to run.

How to manually remove this virus?

Follow these steps below.

Plug in your flash drive into the USB port and do not double click on the Flash drive.

Flash Drive Precaution
Use Windows Explorer instead to explore the flash drive or by right click the disk drive and choose ‘Explore’.

windows explorer precaution

Click on Tools > Folder Options > View. Under Advanced Settings choose the option to ‘Show hidden files and folders’ and click OK. (You can now view your hidden folders)

Show Hidden Files

Delete all hidden folders beginning with the dot example .foldername.
Thereafter delete the _.trash, RECYCLER folder, autorun.inf and also the shortcuts.

Now to unhide the folders, go to your command prompt. Click on Start > Run > type ‘cmd’ to go to command prompt.

Type this (for example my flash drive is at f:, you may replace the letter f with your flash drive alphabet)

attrib -h -r -s /s /d f:\*.*

DOS attribute Change

This might take a while, and when it’s done, voila you have your flash drive back to its working order.

Now ain’t you glad that there is a solution.

Note: This is easier to understand if you are technical savvy, if you really had trouble understanding this post, I would recommend downloading antivirus software which might or might not solve this problem. Doing it the manual way usually is the efficient way to solve this problem.

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