"I made the mistake of not backing up my thesis," he said.

He came home from class Monday to find that the Chernobyl virus had struck--his thesis was gone.

Majmudar, whose these is due today, said he wasted an entire day dealing with the problem and scanning the single hard copy of his thesis into a working computer.

According to the CERT Welside the virus, which only affects computers running Windows 95 or 98, overwrites part of a computer's hard drive with random data. This leads the computer to think that the hard drive is empty, preventing a user from accessing the drive's files.

It is still unclear whether the virus, which is much more destructive than the recent Melissa virus, merely prevents access to the hard drive or irretrievably destroys the information contained on it, Pollak said.

Robert T. Dennis '02, whose computer froze early Monday morning while he was working on a paper for Expository Writing, said some of his Thayer entryway-mates told him there may be away to save his files.

As his roommate, entryway-mates, and pre-froshwatched, he tried to restart his computer and gotonly a blank screen with the message, "Disk BootFailure," he said.

Benjamin G. Delbanco '02, who lives in Dennis'entryway, worked with other students on thecomputer for several hours in attempts to recoverthe missing data.

Yesterday, he said, the group finally was ableto retrieve the information from Dennis' harddrive.

"We kind of jury-rigged it," he said.

Delbanco, who said he thinks his method couldbe applicable to other Chernobyl-struck computers,put the hard drive into a working computer anddownloaded the files in order to recover the datathat had been lost.

Though Dennis' hard drive itself will need tobe reformatted, Delbanco said he anticipates itwill soon be functional.

Meanwhile, the virus' unlucky victims are lefthoping for a quick fix and scrambling toreconstruct final papers as end-of-term deadlinesnear and the threat of late penalties looms largefor virus victims.

"If this were my fault in any way I'd be angryabout it, but as it is, there's nothing I can do,"Eil said.

"I'm trying to stay positive even though it'spretty much a total disaster," he added.

Rick Osterberg '96, coordinator of residentialcomputing, could not be reached for commentregarding the virus yesterday.

No one else could say for sure how many Harvardcomputers were struck by the virus or what thetotal amount of damage that it caused would be forHarvard's computer users