So, most likely you are recovering from a malware or virus infection and you have found that on certain folders you are unable to untick the hidden attribute (usually greyed out). Well heres a quick and simple fix!

A little Background info first!

I found a laptop infected with a strain of win32.Malware-gen, what a sneaky strain at that! After a poke around of what it does i found the malware made any folder (on the infected USB drive) hidden, read only and also made a .exe file for every folder name with a folder icon! this was its way of tricking people into running it. It seems to target USB drives to spread.

I found they were all exe files by unticking the option in folder options “hide extensions for known filetypes” while your in there tick “show hidden files and folders”

Anyway on with the simple fix. once you have cleaned up the virus!! and deleted the foldername.exe files

from command prompt. Issue the command (assuming the drive in question is F:)

attrib -H -S F:\*.* /S /D

The folders should once again be visable and you will be able to toggle the hidden attribute, it will no longer be greyed out.