Dphi Acquisitions, Inc.

Michael B Propps

Lane W Lee

Stanton MacDonough Keeler

Daniel R Zaharris

Christopher J Turner

An optical disc drive waits to receive a command to perform a function on optical media in the disc drive. The optical media includes a pitted premastered area that cannot be overwritten and a grooved user-writeable area that can be overwritten. Once a command is received, one portion of the disc drive processes the command while another portion of the disc drive monitors the processing of the command and waits until the command is processed. If an error condition is detected while processing the command, the disc drive generates an event request such as a notify event request, a focus event request, a spin event request, and a tracking event request. When an event issues, the disc drive interrupts processing of the command and attempts to recover from the error condition. The state of the disc drive when the requested event was received is saved before attempting to recover from the error condition. If the recovery attempt is successful, the saved state of the disc drive is restored, and the interrupted command continues to be processed at the point where the interruption occurred. A command finished event is issued when the command is complete. If the recovery attempt was not successful, the interrupted command is replaced with a servo abort command to terminate the interrupted command.

System and method for handling commands in an optical disc drive

A method and apparatus for storing, updating, adding, deleting, and locating file system objects on a WORM storage medium, wherein information can be written to, but not erased from, the storage medium. The WORM storage medium has a writeable area that includes a system area and a data area. The system area includes system information regarding the file system objects on the storage medium. A system sector is written starting at one end of the system area, while the content of the file system objects is written in the data area starting at another end of the writeable area. When a change is made to the file system objects in the writeable area, an updated system sector is generated that replaces the previous file system information for those modified file system objects. Since the previous system sector is not erasable, the updated system sector is written in a location in the system area where it will be read before any previous system sectors. The updated system sector overrides file system information in previously generated system sectors. The information required to access all the file system objects on the storage medium may be included in the updated system sector, or in the updated system sector along with one or more of the previously generated system sectors.

Method and apparatus for emulating read/write file system on a write-once storage disk

A method and system for managing a plurality of defects that may cause an error during a write operation in a write-once data storage disk is provided. A host system sends a write command to a disk drive that contains the storage disk. The process detects any errors that may occur during the write operation. When an error is detected, a 'skip list' containing the addresses of physical sectors on the disk that are to be skipped during a read operation is updated, the write operation is suspended, and the process attempts to rewrite the data in another sector. If the rewrite is performed successfully, the write operation continues. Otherwise, the write operation is terminated and the host device is notified. While the disk drive is operative, the skip list is preferably maintained in a buffer memory, but periodically the entries in the skip list are copied to the disk for permanent storage. Before a read operation begins, the skip list is copied from the disk to the memory. When a file is read from the disk, any 'skip sectors' that are encompassed within the file are skipped (i.e., the data in those sectors is not read). The method of this invention is particularly useful in supplementing an error correction code, which typically has difficulty dealing with errors of longer duration.

Skip list management for a write-once optical disk

A file system for accessing information on digital storage media is provided by a storage device controller embedded within the storage device. The storage device controller includes an interface component to receive a packet having a file system command. A command decode component in the storage device controller decodes the file system command, and an interface response structure component creates a strategy for performing the file system command. The storage device controller generates an identifier for a file system object and accesses the file system object using the file system object's identifier. A host system coupled to the storage device receives a storage device access request from an application program and generates a command to perform on the file system object based on the storage device access request. The host system uses the identifier to indicate the file system object to be accessed.

File system management embedded in a storage device

A data storage disk includes a writeable area that allows a user to write data, wherein the data files are written from the outside diameter towards the inside diameter of the writeable area, while file system information is written from the inside diameter towards the outside diameter of the writeable area. This optimizes the use of the writeable area, whether a large number of small data files or a small number of large data files are being stored. To further optimize the use of the writeable area, information may be stored in two or more different error correction code (ECC) block sizes. Thus, information, such as the file system attributes and linking sectors, which contains few bytes may be stored in the smaller ECC block size, while the data may be stored in the larger ECC block size. The data storage disk, may also include a mastered content area.

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Loveland, CO, United States of America

Michael B Propps