The present invention relates to a record carrier, drive device and method of reading from or writing to the record carrier, wherein a predetermined navigation area (DN) is provided on said record carrier for storing at least one predetermined parameter specifying at least one of a logical format and an application format used on said record carrier. Thereby, a universal portable disc format can be provided, where a single disc can contain content in many formats from many different devices and all these content types can coexist. A clean separation of physical, logical and application level structures is thus possible without loosing any flexibility or ability of drive devices to maintain these structures.