What does .lnk mean?

[lywfrank3]

Hello,
I don't know what happened, but all my desktop icons now have .lnk extensions and I can't access anything. How can I fix this?

 

[Ubrales]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware!

Can you use "System Restore" in Accessories and restore the computer to a known good date?

 

[d1g1t4l3ch0]

It sounds like your file association for LNK files has been lost somehow. There is a fix for it found by someone else on another forum. It's a registry file as far as I can tell and only requires adding the info from it into the registry and possibly rebooting windows. Link To Source This however still may not work if your association for REG files has been lost as well. If that is the case and you cannot run the REG file, you should still be able to import it into the registry with the command line.

If you need to import the reg file into registry from command line, open the Run dialog. You can open this by pressing the [WIN]+[R] buttons together or by going to Start / All Programs / Accessories / Command Prompt. Then at the command line, enter REG IMPORT filename.reg. Replace "filename.reg" with the actual filename of the REG file. Then press enter. Note: I believe this may only work if you are logged in as an administrator.