INFORMATION RECORDING MEDIUM, INFORMATION RECORDING METHOD, INFORMATION RECORDING DEVICE, INFORMATION REPRODUCTION METHOD, AND INFORMATION REPRODUCTION DEVICE

摘要

Attempting to use defect entries to manage defective clusters located inside spare regions has the issue that, as factors such as an increasing number of layers are accompanied by increasing spare region size, DFL size automatically increases as well. The provided information recording medium carries pointer information indicating, for each spare region, a corresponding next usable location. The information recording medium also limits the direction in which spare regions can be used, and provides defect entries, in a DFL, that indicate defective clusters in spare regions. This allows the DFL (21) to be kept compact even if the size of the spare regions (15) increases. Also, even after physical reformatting, it is possible to verify that defective clusters in spare regions (15) are defective and prevent them from being reallocated (used) as replacement clusters.