Well we all have our own opinions and the risk we are willing to take to make things less of a hassle. Mine is that the Edirol repair function is not really rolling the dice, although of course you could save the file to another disc first if you're afraid of it screwing up the file. There have been no reports that I know of the Edirol repair function not working & it is really easy to use. And now that I think of it, I doubt if it's possible for it to ruin the file. All it does is to change the header to what it thinks is correct. If it wrote the header wrong, you'd be no worse off than you were before and you could still try other methods to correct the header.
My posts are generally meant to attempt to make things easy for relatively inexperienced members or ones who are not into the technical stuff. For those people, trying to repair the header in other ways can seem really overwhelming.
Agree. I had the exact same thing happen as the OP - power failure (luckily only 2min before end of show) on the deck. Used repair, got an almost-complete show. Since all that is wrong is an incomplete header in that case, I don't know what more extensive data recovery efforts are necessary.
Interesting note, it seems that the more advanced Edirol units like the R-44 do not require this to be done; I had my 44 lose power once when the DVD battery became disconnected, and it still wrote readable files. I wonder if the newer Edirol portables all do that, like the R-5.