Shore Guy,
I believe that the NTSB are in the middle of a program requiring certain aircraft to be fitted with a solid state CVR which has a capability of 2 hours recording, by 2005. This was increased from the 30 minutes required for tape.
An accompanying article suggested that it was no longer possible to get a "tape"-based CVR, I don't know if that is true.
I believe the European standard follows that of EUROCAE ED-56A , which has the same 2 hour recording requirement.
I guess it would not be too difficult to "dump" selective sections from the "live" area, for later retrieval in the event of an incident like this.