Patent ID: 6870800

Claim:
A method of searching for a boundary position between a recorded region and an unrecorded region of a recording disc which has been subjected to recording operation by an information recording apparatus having a recording/reproducing head for recording an information signal on the recording disc and reading recorded information from the recording disc to generate a read signal, and a slider unit for transferring said recording/reproducing head in a radial direction of the recording disc, said method comprising: a scan RF search step of forcedly transferring said recording/reproducing head in the radial direction of the disc in response to a recording start instruction while confirming the presence or absence of an RF signal carrying the information signal in the read signal, and controlling said slider unit to stop a transfer operation of said recording/reproducing head upon detection of a transition from a state in which the RF signal exists to a state in which no RF signal exists; an overrun distance measuring step of measuring a distance from a position of said recording/reproducing head at the time of the transition from the state in which the RF signal exists to the state in which no RF signal exists to a stop position at which said recording/reproducing head is finally stopped as an overrun distance; and a boundary position transfer step of finding a boundary position between a recorded region of the information signal and an unrecorded region of the recording disc based on the overrun distance and the stop position, and controlling said slider unit to transfer said recording/reproducing head to the found boundary position.