Recovering a track with no TOC record.

[Energy]

Hey all,

I recently recorded something important to me and as I picked up my HI-MD unit, to my dismay the battery door opened. Thus the screen went blank, and darkness fell upon the earth. The disc claims to be a blankdisc. It's a standard disc (80mins).

Now my guess for this is that the MD stores the opening address of the begining of the music track, and when it stops recording it decides the ending address and then writes this to the TOC, along with a title plus anything else that needs to be set. So my guess is that by the MD lossing the power at this moment the data was never written to the TOC. So technically the recording is still on the disc just not given a proper address. Am I wrong and should I give up now?

So would it be possible to basically write a TOC entry that states the whole disc is a track and then just browse through it at my lesiure seeing if I can find the section that has my recording on? If so, are there any tools availble to help do this?

Am I wrong and stupid?

Please tell me!

Thanks

[raintheory]

I am familiar with TOC-Cloning and have used it many times to retrieve audio data on Legacy MD. A few weeks back I modified my NH-900 to attempt TOC-Cloning for Hi-MD... Didn't work.

In short, you are correct as far as Standatd (Legacy) MD. But with Hi-MD things are not quite the same.

My post and findings: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=16131

Another thread with info: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=8178

Edited July 17, 2006 by raintheory

[Energy]

I am familiar with TOC-Cloning and have used it many times to retrieve audio data on Legacy MD. A few weeks back I modified my NH-900 to attempt TOC-Cloning for Hi-MD... Didn't work.

In short, you are correct as far as Standatd (Legacy) MD. But with Hi-MD things are not quite the same.

My post and findings: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=16131

Another thread with info: http://forums.minidisc.org/index.php?showtopic=8178

Thanks, interesting read. Suppose it's my bad for not searching harder.

Pretty gutted, suppose for now I should leave the disc up on a shelf and not touch it just in case. Heck I'm interested in learning about the Legacy MD TOC cloning as that could be really helpful. I jsut hope that sony realises now that MD is slowly melting away that they should open the format up. I doubt it'll happen though. Still too much of the technology in use.

[raintheory]

I would hold onto the disc for now and see if any procedures come about for Hi-MD to recover lost recordings...

As far as Legacy TOC-Cloning:

If you have an old legacy recorder it should be fairly easy to modify to enable TOC-Cloning...

For both of the portables I modified there were two things. One being the switch that cuts off the power when the eject mechanism is used (the switch will probably be located at or around the actual eject switch mechanism), and the other is the one that cuts power and lets the recorder know a disc has been ejected when the actual hinged door is opened (on both the R700 and RH900 this was near the mic input, you can easily see where a metal tab presses down on the switch). They should be fairly easy to find on most models. Try the downloads section for the sevice manual of whatever model you are going to attempt it with.

Basically you will need to disable the eject mechanism switch (I had to do this by physically breaking it on both of my models, though they still work fine after doing so), and rigging something up to hold down the switch that the metal tab on the door activated when a disc is inserted.

Keep in mind that this will definitely void any warranty on the unit... Also I can't guarantee this to work for any particular unit, so do so at your own risk.

---

After modifying the unit, you will need to create a "source" disc... Basically a disc consisting on 1 long track the entire length of the disc (in whatever format the original disc was in).

Then insert the "source" disc as you normally would and allow the unit to load the TOC. Be sure the player is stopped (put not turned off) and eject the "source" disc... Insert your original disc before the unit powers down, and press play. Now simply rename the track and press stop... The TOC from the "source" disc is written to the original disc...

I'll open up my R700 again at some point and take some photos so I can write up more detailed instrctions of this procedure...

For now, I hope this helps.

-aA

EDIT: Here are a few links that describe TOC cloning procedures for other models (SONY Decks, Sharp portables, etc.)

Some of these might be rather dated....

http://minidisc.amulation.com/cloning_procedure.html

http://www-public.tu-bs.de:8080/~y0001729/...lone/index.html

http://members.aol.com/BorusSylt/minidisc.html

http://ravn.net/md/

Edited July 17, 2006 by raintheory