A Bangladeshi student said on Sunday he had invented a software programme that can quickly revive computers crippled by the Chernobyl virus.

Monirul Islam Sharif, a student in Dhaka University's Computer Science department, has called his invention "MRECOVER" after his name and plans to post it on the Internet.

He said he had successfully applied it to cure more than one computer plagued by the Chernobyl virus - also known as CIH after the initials of its alleged creator Chen Ing Hau - that struck worldwide on April 26.

Up to 15,000 computers were disabled and had their memories and data wiped by the CIH attack in Bangladesh, computer users and dealers said. A friend had asked me to do something to help recover his lost data following the CIH attack," the 21-year-old Sharif said.

"I found that my formula was able to recover his lost data. I tried once again with another damaged Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and applied the same formula, which also worked." Chen, a 24-year-old Taiwanese information engineer now serving mandatory military service, has claimed responsibility for the computer havoc, admitting his involvement in creating the CIH virus.

CIH hit hardest in countries with weak anti-virus defences, gumming up hundreds of thousands of computers in South Korea, Turkey, China, India, Bangladesh, the Mideast and elsewhere. Sharif said: "By applying my software it takes only a few minutes to recover the lost data.

"It can retrieve data much more quickly and efficiently than any of the other customised software of multinational computer giants available on the Internet," Sharif added. Born in England in 1977, Sharif also went to school there in his early years.

Dr Rafiqul Islam, a professor in the Department of Applied Physics and Electronics at Dhaka University was enthusiastic about Sharif's virus-busting programme. "With his software you can recover lost data within a few minutes... while it takes hours by others," he said.