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by Sanjit Singh

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(IDG) -- One student invented it, but another has written an antidote to help users who lost data to the CIH computer virus.

The Chernobyl virus, also known as CIH, was invented by onetime Taiwanese student Chen Ing-hau and caused havoc all over Asia April 26, infecting thousands of PCs in South Korea, Singapore, India, Bangladesh and China. (Most major U.S. corporations with updated antivirus software escaped serious damage.) But it now has a cure, courtesy of Monirul Islam Sharif, an undergraduate computer science student at Dhaka University in Bangladesh.

Sharif, 21, said he wrote the 70K-byte C language program, which he called MRECOVER, in 24 hours.

"I started working on it on April 27, when a friend brought his infected hard drive to me, and by the next day, it worked when I tried it out. Most of the data on the disk was recovered," he said.

Sharif tried it on several other computers at Dhaka, and it worked there, too, recovering data in minutes.

"If your machine uses FAT [File Allocation Table], MRECOVER will recover all the data on the disk within three to four minutes. But if your computer uses FAT 16, then it will recover all data after the first partition, limiting the recovery to between 40 and 60 percent," Sharif said. He added that the antidote doesn't work on hard drives with a capacity of 8G bytes or more.

The program is free to use and has been posted on the Web at http://members.xoom.com/monirdomain for anybody who wants to download it. A new and improved version for machines that use FAT 16 will be ready within days and followed by one for large-capacity hard drives. Sharif said he has received 3,000 hits and innumerable e-mail messages since he put MRECOVER on the Internet May 5, but the inventor doesn't see any commercial gain from the program.

Sharif, who was born in England and spent his early childhood there, graduates next June. He said his ambition is to head to the U.S. for higher studies.

"I would like to go to the U.S. to do a master's in computer science. But it's unlikely that I will specialize in antivirus programs. I still find general programming much more interesting," he said.