While working on my computer one fine day, I happened to encounter the control of machine over human orders. While I was working on few files and moving them across folders, I was supposed to unhide hidden files before I could do any sort of operation. As a regular computer user, went to folder options (under Tools) in explorer and did click on the usual radio-button saying:-
Show hidden Files & Folders
Computer did respond by showing a busy signal, but not for very long when I realized that none of the hidden files got unhidden. Surprised, I again opened the pop-up only to see my machine over-riding my command and setting the radio-button back to the message saying:-
Do not show hidden files & Folders
Having an anti-virus on the system, the above anomaly was unexpected and unusual (with anti-virus getting updated on daily basis). Anyways, tried scanning the system but to no avail when I started out the search for manually removing the virus succumbing my system to death. Oh, If I forgot to mention the reason for all, it’s because of a virus residing on your desktop in one of those autorun.inf files on the system. These are initialization files which help in initialing the processes as and when required.
The search began and after much search on net, I found few basic attempts to solve the matters at hand.
I tried exploring a little more and would like to explain them to you so that anybody facing the same problem, don’t end up relegating the control to machine (we humans are a lot better than them after all!!!)
· Click Windows +R and type ‘cmd’ or ‘command prompt’ to open the command prompt manager. The default manager would open like:-
Once opened, use cd\ to reach to the root level of the existing default directory.
Now type in the required directory name (where hidden files are located) with a colon at the end and press enter:
C:\>D: and press enter
The directory moves to the new directory drive D.
Now reach to the particular folder using cd xyz and press enter (xyz should be the name of the folder). Continue till the time you reach to the exact location.
If the location where hidden files are located is also hidden or unknown, use dir/ah or dir to see all the folders within the path. Now make use of attrib command to unhide all the hidden files in the respective folder.
D:\>attrib -h xyz
-h specifies the given folder needs to be removed from hidden tag and converted into a normal folder. +h indicates to convert a normal folder into a hidden one.
I was able to use the above methods for files/ folders containing single words in their name (not a combination of words separated by spaces) and also the process was manual with every time typing the name of the file and folder to unhide it and moving on to the next one. This got me to search further to find a more ideal solution to unhide all hidden files at once and that too all kinds of files without mentioning their names.
Keep reading for how can this be achieved:-
· In order to unhide all the hidden files on your system at once, this was the method I could find.
Click on Windows +R and type ‘regedit’ to open a pop-up window like:-
As one could see the listing on the left-hand side, click on to respective links to reach to the following destination:-
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced\Folder\Hidden\SHOWALL
Once here, one would see attributes against SHOWALL on right hand side.
Have a look at the checkedValue parameter & see the value attached along it. It is a hexa-decimal number following by a numeric value in brackets (as shown in figure above). Make sure that the type of this parameter is REG_DWORD, and if not, delete this parameter and create a new parameter of above type and same name.
Double click the item to modify and change it from 0 to 1:-
After changing, press F5 continuously to check whether the value of checkedValue parameter goes back to 0.
If it doesn’t, open explorer (My computer) and in tools use folder options to Show all hidden files and folders. If the problem persists, that would be because of the checkedValue parameter switching back to 0. Have a look!!!
If you are able to see hidden files now, the problem is over and you can now safely move on to make use of those new unhidden files & folders.
However, if problem persists, it is because of the Explorer.exe process running in the background. What needs to be done is stop the explorer process for a short duration, till we are not able to unhide all the folders/files. Open the task manager, and go the processes section of it.
There many processes would be displayed, locate explorer.exe and by right clicking on to it, set the affinity of the process. By clicking here, it would show you how many processors the process is currently running on i.e. the System and Program in form of CPU0 & CPU1.
Unclick CPU0 and click ok. This would make the process get terminated from running on to system. Now go to registry editor as opened above, and in SHOWALL, modify the checkedvalue setting from 0 to 1.
After doing it, click F5 only to see that it doesn’t toggle back to 0 now.
Open folder options now and click Show all hidden files and folders only to see all the files of the system being displayed to you. Make use of these files/folders as you want, and do not forget to set the affinity of explorer.exe process back as normal using the Windows Task Manager.
Hope the above methodology helps, and lemme know if you still find any difficulties.
All the best,
Raghav
