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I was working on my PC yesterday morning when some virus popped up and I got rid of it but now all my movie files, pictures and documents have the extension .xyz at the end of them. How can I open them so I can watch my videos, view my pictures and work on my documents?

Blair Gibson
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    Have you tried just renaming it to `.mp4` or `.mov` or `.avi` or any other common video extension and playing it? If you don't want to go through mass renaming, have you tried just loading the file in your movie program (like VLC) ... extensions are for humans, computers don't care as long as the data is in the right format . – txtechhelp Jun 15 '15 at 20:26
  • @txtechhelp ...to a point. If I took a Word file and renamed it to file.xyz. I could go into Word, File -> Open, and open it just fine. However if I tried to open it through Explorer, Windows is going to complain about not knowing how to open a .xyz file. – kazoni Jun 15 '15 at 20:40
  • I tried renaming it like resume.doc but when I try to open it it still says resume.doc.xyz and won't let me open it at all. Just pisses me off because it did it to every file, luckily one file was saved that I really needed (not sure how that happened) and another file I will start from scratch I guess. Chalk it up to a loss I guess. – Blair Gibson Jun 15 '15 at 22:18
  • Thanks for all the help though. Even after I changed the extension I would click on prooperties and it would still have .xyz at the end of it, you live you leanr lol – Blair Gibson Jun 15 '15 at 22:19

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You should be able to just change the filename to whatever extension you need. Windows will confirm that you're changing the extension, but unless the file was corrupted or changed beyond the extension it should work fine.

Alpheus
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  • Adding, just to be clear: There isn't really a straightforward way to restore the original filenames of all the files automatically (presuming you don't have a backup). You'll have to rename them yourself. Data isn't lost, the filenames are just changed. You *might* be able to find some automatic extension tools based on file contents online to get you close, not sure. E.g. with the Linux / Mingw `file` command you could theoretically write some scripts to help out, I guess. – Jason C Jun 15 '15 at 22:04
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might be a ransomware virus with encryption. There are some out there which can't be broken (encrypted by AES256) and you'll need to pay to get files back. could be 50 - 100.

Try to Drag & Drop the file into Word or Video Player

You can't change the extension because of either:

  • the virus is still active and changing it back each time you change it.

  • you don't have File Name Extension checked and the xyz extension is registered by the virus and so is hidden as it's known. enter image description here

If your files are just renamed, you can bulk rename files using Total Commander.
If someone in similar situation would need to bulk rename hundreds of files, trid - in windows similar to 'file' commandis a way to automatically distinguish file types.

papo
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