Paul Willison wrote:
> So...any ideas on what happened? I did NOT reformat before the error, an=
d indeed, had used the disc the previous night with no issues.
> A recording that I had already in part listened to(and was thus saved) wa=
s ALSO caught up in the odd "reformat" issues.
> Any idea what happened? I'm just trying to avoid the same issue again do=
wn the road.
i guess the thing to understand is that with md and himd alike it is not
just a case of a recording being 'saved' or not; all the audio is
accessed via a table of contents (you've probably seen your recorder
display messages about it's 'TOC'). the table of contents (for the
*entire* disc, not just for the new recordings) is written/modified
after a recording is made, hence the saving data/toc writing messages.
i'm fairly sure that the 'saving data' message that the himds display is
a misnomer. the 'data' is already 'saved' - there's nowhere else for it
to be held as it is written during recording except onto the 1gb disc
the recorder contains. it's not saving data at that point, but creating
the reference chart that will allow it to *find* that data. so when you
have a power failure before the recorder can modify the disc's table of
contents, although the data is technically on the disc, the recorder
cannot access it to play it back because it has no way to find it. and
if you have a power failure *while* your recorder is modifying the
disc's table of contents (which i suspect is what happened in your case)
it leaves you with a corrupt TOC, which, although it may manage to
access the data once or briefly (perhaps the himds have some kind of
data buffer that remembers TOC info for a short time for convenience'
sake?), will ultimately make the entire disc unreadable. there was/is a
way to copy a blank TOC onto a regular md, allowing one to retrieve lost
data (i've done it many times myself), but, as far as i am aware, it is
still impossible to do so for a himd.
so, in summary: avoid allowing your recorder to completely run down
it's battery. although, yes, the himd will attempt to use its last bit
of power to write its TOC, if the battery is faulty, or not running at
full capacity due to atmospheric conditions, it can fail before the
recorder finishes its task (causing you to lose the whole disc) or
before it can begin its task (causing you to lose your current recording
only, since the table of contents will remain unchanged from the
previous session).
i hope this helps - i'm sure others with more technical knowledge than
me will chime in with any corrections (rob? oryoki?)
best,
patrick
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