2-FEB-80

	I must start this letter off with my sincere thanks to 

Mike Higgins.  First I used his program UICREC and his notes

to recover the data on my 300 MByte disk after the

controller went nuts and wrote bad parity in my storage bit map.  I also

am indebted to Mike for the ideas that led to the creation of LAZRUS.

	LAZRUS is a program that was written in great haste

like UICREC.  I borrowed heavily from Mike Higgins ideas and

his code.  UICREC is designed to get valid files from a corrupted

disk.  LAZRUS is designed to get "deleted" files from a valid

disk.  UICREC and LAZRUS work very much alike and before using

LAZRUS one should read all of Mike's documentation.

	LAZRUS was written because someone did the infamous

PIP *.*;*/DE on the WRONG UIC.  This person wanted the files

back very badly.  In order for LAZRUS to be of any help, one must

stop writing on the disk immediately after deleting the files

that one wishes he had not deleted.  When LAZRUS is run it will bring

back all of the deleted files that are OWNED (not in a directory) by 

a given UIC.  It will likely bring back more files than the user wants.

The user has the responsibility of deciding which files he wants to keep.


	I wanted to add several features to LAZRUS but I have

run out of time to work on the program.  I would like LAZRUS to have:

	1)  The ability to specify the extension of the files to

	    be resurrected.  i. e. bring back only the files with .FTN

	    extension.

	2)  The ability to preserve the creation and revision dates.  Right

	    now LAZRUS will resurrect a file, put it on a new disk.  The 

	    date of the file on the new disk is the date it was resurrected.

	    One can use the QIO write attributes mechanism to do this

	    rather easily, but I don't have time to try it out.

	A few enhancements for UICREC:

	1)  UICREC should be able to search a whole disk instead of just

	    a particular UIC.  However this search should be

	    restricted by file extentsion.  Thus one could scan

	    the device DB: for all files in all UICs with the

	    extension .FTN.

	2)  UICREC should also support the preservation of the
	
	    creation and revision dates. The code for this is the

	    same as that needed for LARZUS.


	Anyyone who finds a bug in LAZRUS or who is interested

	in doing some work to improve the program please contact

			PHILIP CANNON

			SCIENCE APPLICATIONS, INC.

			SUITE 901

			1211 WEST 22 ND STREET

			OAKBROOK, IL.   60521

			(312) 655-5960