Hi Folks, hope you can help. I have been using a USB drive to store students assignments for marking and on Monday when I plugged it in to store some more assignments it automatically was scanned for viruses and detected an infection which was cleaned automatically. When I opened it again yesterday I noticed that most of the directories were no longer visible but when I did a virus scan the folders all showed up in the dialog box as being scanned, also if I tried to make another folder of the same name as one that was missing the system says folder already exists. Which makes me think that the folders are invisible not deleted.
I have gone into the folder options and set display all hidden folders to no avail, so I tried some recovery software and this finds the files but none are actually usable when I try to open them.
Any ideas? The Virus software the University uses is McAfee and I used "Recover My Files" to try and recover them.
regards
Aussie_User

You can try this FREE program for file recovery:
CONVAR & PCinspector Data Recovery Datenrettung recupero dati datarecovery récupération données
I have no experience with it but you can give it a try!

Robin

Welcome to PCHF!
What operating system are you trying to view the files from your USB drive? (Windows XP, Windows Vista etc).

Hi Cowburn199, I am using Windows XP.When I list the properties of the USB the disk space used still shows that the folders/files are present as over 50% of the available space has been used. So I don't know why I can't view the files.

Have you tried the USB drive in a different computer? This will help us rule out whether it is a setting on the actual computer itself.

Thanks Cowburn199, I used the USB on another computer and the hidden folders appeared dimmed with the Hidden property unable to be reset, so I copied the contents of each folder into new folders and deleted the old ones. Problem solved.
Thanks for your help.