Windows folders hidden after migration to virtual machine

A few months ago, we’ve undertaken the project of migrating all our old Pentium IV servers to a virtual platform.  Apart from the extra flexibility which this offers in terms of provisioning, we’re also benefiting from a huge power saving, since a modern Dell platform can easily host a dozen older servers.

However, after having migrated a Windows server, we observed that the attributes of folders on the filesystem had been modified.  In Windows Explorer, everything seemed all right, but when FTP’ing to certain folders, or when viewing them with the ‘dir’ command, the folder were hidden.  It appeared that the ’system’ attribute had been set throughout the C drive.

We solved the problem by executing

attrib /S /D -S -H -R

Cheers,

Denis