James Caran asked,
| I have an MD that I recorded on my Portable that will not play
| back, even on my MDS-JB930 deck. I suspect that the very end of the write
| did not work, and the TOC is screwed up.
|
| Can I rescue this disk with my MD Deck, or is it a more difficult
| maneuver? There was some pretty important material on there. (The disk
| still gives a track length time, it just won't play.)
Hmm. If you do see a track with the correct duration, and it doesn't play,
then likely the portable did update the TOC but didn't lay down the audio,
in which case you're out of luck: that material was never recorded.
The JB930 *can* clone TOCs, so you can try a recovery. The instructions
for the JE520 on the MDCP at http://www.minidisc.org/cloning_procedure.html
will work on the JB930 (in the side note about the usual way to exit test
mode that you don't want to take during cloning, substitue "DISPLAY/CHAR"
for "REPEAT"), so you can fill a scratch disc of the same capacity with a
single track that occupies the entire space on the disc and clone its TOC to
the disc that is giving you the problem. Be sure you don't dirty the TOC of
the cloning source disc before cloning, because I have a hunch that you
might want to keep the original TOC on the problem disc.
So don't write the single-track TOC to the problem disc: rather, without
saving it, use the JB930 to play through the entire duration of the disc.
Any areas on the disc that have never been recorded on will be tough to play
through, and you may end up fast-forwarding across them, but I think on the
off-chance that your portable did record the valuable audio somewhere on
that disc but put the wrong addresses into the TOC entry, you need to check
the entire length. (Normally, once you hit a stretch that has never been
recorded on, the rest of the disc [in order by physical addresses on the
disc surface] has not been recorded on either, so you can stop looking
there, but all bets are off if the disc has been written by a malfunctioning
recorder.) If you do find audio that you want to keep, divide each piece
off into a track by itself; then delete the tracks containing material you
don't want to keep or never-recorded stretches.
If you don't find the missing audio anywhere, don't save the cloned TOC onto
the problem disc; rather, leave the TOC clean and eject the problem disc
without updating. Good luck, but if you do have an unplayable track where
the missing audio ought to be, I wouldn't hold out much hope.
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