Patent ID: 7814291

Claim:
A drive device for providing access to a record carrier having a universal disc format standardized to be independent of an application format used on said record carrier thus allowing files to be written on the record carrier in multiple formats while allowing specific low level optimizations for specific applications, said drive device comprising: access means for providing at least one of a read access and a write access to at least one predetermined parameter written on a predetermined navigation area on said record carrier, said at least one predetermined parameter specifying at least one of a logical format and an application format used on said record carrier, wherein said access means is arranged to write to said navigation area a location information of data accessed at a rate higher than an access pattern information for sequential data retrieval, wherein the record carrier is partitioned into separate areas, where the areas are in units of fragments, the partitions comprising at least a first partition assigned to a basic file system and a second partition presentable to legacy devices for storing files in at least a first file format associated with a first legacy device and a second file format associated with a second legacy device so that a first access device accesses first content in said first file format and a second access device accesses second content in said second file format, the first content type being different from the second content type, and wherein said access means is further configured to see all files of multiple formats included in the record carrier including recognizing a file having one format on the record carrier without understanding content of the file, and ignoring the file having the one format, wherein said at least one predetermined parameter further specifies a partition descriptor information (PD) for specifying a fragment allocation to define a not necessarily contiguous space associated with each of said first and second partitions, wherein remaining unassigned fragment allocations may be dynamically assigned to one of the at least first and second partitions, thereby dynamically extending the first and second partitions.