How to fix corrupted files that changes to shortcuts in your hard drives

We all must have experienced a situation in which we notice that all the files (documents, videos, pictures etc.) contained in our removable drive are now appearing as shortcuts. This is a common issue with removable drives such as flash drives, memory cards and external hard disk drives. it is as a result of inserting the drive in an infected computer which will result to the corruption of the files contained in the removable drive by converting all files to shortcut.

Before considering formatting of your removable drive as your last resort, follow this steps to fix your corrupted files which are all shortcuts:

• Insert the removable drive to your computer.

• Take note of the drive letter, (e.g drive G:), you can check this by clicking on Start button in Windows, then click 'Computer' to display all the available drives installed.

Installed drives

• Open windows command prompt, by clicking the Start button, then in the search box type 'cmd', then right-click on 'cmd' and run as administrator.

• Enter this command: attrib -h -r -s /s /d g:\*.*  replace the letter 'g' with your removable drive letter e.g. i: 

Now open the drive to see your restored files and then delete all the shortcuts.

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