May 20, 1999 Web posted at: 1:18 p.m. EDT (1718 GMT) by Sanjit Singh

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(IDG) -- A 21-year-old Bangladeshi student who invented an antidote for the CIH, or Chernobyl, virus has declared that his software is safe, despite concern about the program voiced by professional antivirus authors.

Developers at U.S. data recovery firm OnTrack Data International Inc. said that users of the free utility, called MRECOVER -- written by Bangladeshi student Monirul Islam Sharif -- might be in danger of losing fully recoverable critical data.

OnTrack's criticism, however, is not about the core MRECOVER program, but the readme.txt file that comes with it, Sharif stressed.

The Chernobyl or CIH virus, invented by one-time Taiwanese student Chen Ing-hau, caused havoc all over Asia on April 26, hitting thousands of PCs in Korea, Singapore, India, Bangladesh, and China.

After the virus hit, Sharif said, he wrote a 70KB C-language antidote program, which he called MRECOVER, in 24 hours, and posted it on his Web site.

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OnTrack engineer Sean Barry, however, said that users may be putting themselves at greater risk of losing data if they follow instructions appearing in the program's accompanying text files. Barry noted that if the utility does not recover the data, the instructions in the program tell users that they may have to format their storage device. The problem with the text instructions as they now read, according to OnTrack's Barry, is that if users reformat their hard drives, professionally written programs that otherwise may have been able to recover all the lost data may not be able to.

OnTrack said it recommended that if users decide to use shareware or freeware utilities to recover from the CIH virus, they should avoid re-partitioning or reformatting their storage device if the utility does not work. The firm said its data recovery engineers have recovered useable data for worldwide customers who have suffered data loss from the CIH virus. In most cases, it has been a 100 percent recovery from the virus corruption, OnTrack said.

Sharif, for his part, said OnTrack is harping on the semantics of the text of the readme.txt file accompanying his program and not the program itself.

"I have got lots of feedback from users all over the world since I posted MRECOVER at http://members.xoom.com/monirdomain on May 2," he said. He added, however, that, "I accept that in my program, near the end of recovery, it shows a message 'If data recovery is not possible you may have to format.'"

Sharif said that he would change the readme.txt file accompanying the next version of the program to make it clearer that the program does not always work and to avoid misunderstanding on the part of users.

Meanwhile, Sharif said, "I have also mentioned on the Web site, 'MRECOVER will not alter the contents of the disk if it sees data is not recoverable, only when MRECOVER can retrieve data, it will write the changes.' This ensures that the contents are intact and that you can use other methods if available."

The MRECOVER program currently will not recover the first partition of a hard drive if the hard drive uses File Allocation Table (FAT) 16, but the text files accompanying the program clearly say that, Sharif noted.

Additional reporting by Marc Ferranti in New York. The authors write for IDG News Service, a Windows TechEdge affiliate.