If you punched "stop", and the machine finished its business and was sitting there happily looking up at you, you're in fat city: it's whole purpose in life is to save what you record *as you record it*. If it will play back now, it will play back until overwritten, deleted, or the drive is formatted. In short, you're cool.
On the other hand, if you were in the middle of recording a track and you pulled the plug, you're screwed. I'm almost sure that if you power off *without completing a proper "stop" command* that significant information is lost, and therefore so is the track. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news if that was the case, and the rest of this post deals only with that unhappy circumstance.
Fostex does its own disk managment in these units. I don't have the VF, but I do have the D1624, which I believe uses the same disk management strategies. When I exit recording mode on a track (either punch out, stop, or whatnot), the drive always grinds on for 2-3 seconds. During this time, I suspect that it flushes the last buffers of data to the disk, does some housekeeping, and probably writes the moral equivalent of a directory/file link list and EOF to the sound file. If this "cleanup" process is interrupted, I don't know of any way to recover _any_ of the data from that file. And Fostex doesn't publish the format information to allow others to figure out how to salvage it, so I doubt that the various disk-resurrectors could help you here either. Even that would be a vain hope, since it would require gutting the drive out of a borrowed machine.
I power my 1624 from a hefty (read: overkill!) UPS for this reason, among many others. If the lights go out while tracking, I want to be able to punch "STOP!" and save what I have to that point: extremely important if you're working on the 20th overdub in the 200th hour of a project. Or the first hour, for that matter.
Bottom line: use a UPS, *never* interrupt the box while it is thinking (in write mode, anyway!), and back up early and often...
If that latter situation is the case here: I feel your pain. I've been burned by this sort of thing elsewhere in the digital world. It was that, and that alone, that led me to buy a standalone HDR instead of going with a computer-recording (DAW) setup.
[Edited by skippy on 01-05-2001 at 16:52]
Thanks again...