Provided is an information recording/reproducing method and apparatus which can reduce the frequency of access to an information recording medium as much as possible and shorten reading/writing time. An application program or a file system driver has a means for setting a predetermined area in the cache buffer area to overwrite inhibited. Thus, when the data to be read out again is set to overwrite inhibition, the data is not deleted from the cache buffer. Therefore, access to the disk is not caused at the time of re-reading or re-writing, which can shorten reading/writing time.