I had one of the earlier Sony models, which was great - but if anything bad happened when "Writing TOC" (Table Of Contents) was happening, everything on the disc became unreadable. The filesystem was probably the worst thing about mini-disc aside from general availability.
The best thing about them was they were next gen mix-tapes, but random-access rather than sequential. It made editing a playlist way easier (sometimes maxing out available storage to the second) plus they were R/W which means they were also superior to burning CDs which were all still write-only in that era.
With the eject detection pin taped down on my player I'd read the TOC from a working disc, then swap in the broken disc and write the TOC onto it.
I had to do this often enough I made a blank disc with TOC covering its full capacity and a track mark every few minutes, to make it easier to skip through and set correct track marks on the recovered disc.
The disc is shown in the first 20 seconds of the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yaXPx6xWEQ
I had one of the earlier Sony models, which was great - but if anything bad happened when "Writing TOC" (Table Of Contents) was happening, everything on the disc became unreadable. The filesystem was probably the worst thing about mini-disc aside from general availability.
The best thing about them was they were next gen mix-tapes, but random-access rather than sequential. It made editing a playlist way easier (sometimes maxing out available storage to the second) plus they were R/W which means they were also superior to burning CDs which were all still write-only in that era.