Patent ID: 7506199

Claim:
An apparatus for recording and reproducing information that physically divides a recording area of a recording medium into small pages and also partitions the recording area into physical blocks each having a plurality of the pages so as thereby to record and reproduce information in units of the blocks to and from the recording medium, the apparatus comprising: a recording device which, when recording information into the block that is unused in the recording medium, records a specific part of information, in a replicated manner, into each of the pages within the unused block, wherein the recording device calculates a parity bit that is one bit in size for the specific part of information in each of the pages recorded into the recording medium, and adds the resultant parity bit to the specific part of information thereby to record the resultant information; an error detection device which, when the information recorded in the recording medium is reproduced, reads the specific part of information and detects an error in the read specific part of information, wherein the error detection device detects the error in the specific part of information by applying parity checking to the specific part information in a head page within the block; and an error correction device which, when the error is detected by the error detection device, reads a plurality of pieces of the specific part of information recorded in the replicated manner in the same block as where the error is detected, and corrects the error in the specific part of information based on a result of majority voting for the plurality of pieces of read specific part of information, wherein the error correction device takes majority voting for each bit of the plurality of pieces of specific part of information and corrects the error bit by bit and wherein the corrected specific part of information is added to an address translation table until all the plurality of pieces of the specific part of information in all blocks have been read.