How To Manually Remove Viruses from a Flash Disk

When I got my Master Flash Disk from Steve at E-zone School of Computing I was more than excited and eager to try out all the software that was packed in it. I reached home and immediately plugged my flash disk into my computer. On opening the flash disk, all I could see where shortcuts and nothing like the software that was promised.

Read also: DOS commands every teacher of ICT should know.
Related: Software every School Computer Lab should have.
With Mr. Dumba, the teacher behind the ITAU Master Flash Disk at E-zone School of Computing in Nabbingo.

I was deeply disappointed and wondered how Steve a person I held in high esteem could give me an empty flash disk. My guts however, helped me have a benefit of doubt. I got my phone and called Steve to find out whether he had given me the right flash disk. It was then that it downed on me that my computer was heavily infected and the viruses on the computer had in turn infected my valuable flash disk. I didn’t have a reliable antivirus installed on my PC and didn’t know what to do. However, Steve was kind enough to guide me on phone on how to manually remove viruses on flash disks. In this article, I will guide you on how to manually remove viruses on flash disks.

Related: How to make a Multi-Bootable flash disk

Step 1

Plug your infected flash disk into your computer and identify the drive letter. In the picture here, my drive letter is F.

Step 2

Press Windows key + R to open the Run dialogue box.

Step 3

In the run dialogue box, type cmd and press Enter to open command prompt.

Step 4

At the command prompt, type your drive letter followed by a full colon and press enter. In my case it was F:

Step 5

Type attrib -s -h -r /s /d *.* and press enter. Remember to leave a space after every attribute.

Step 6

Identify suspicious virus extensions and shortcuts and delete them one by one. Common extensions are .exe, .bat, .lnk and any other suspicious extension. E.g, to delete batch files, type del *.bat and press enter. Continue with all suspicious extensions and your flash disk will be free of viruses.

You finally have a clean flash drive again.

JOANITA NAKIMULI
0706 384686 / 0786 305112