Apparatus for providing new servo information on a disk without entirely erasing old servo information

摘要

The present invention is a method and apparatus for rewriting servo information on a disk of a hard disk drive. The old servo data is erased after the new servo data has been written, using a stagger erase method. A disk pack having n sides is provided, where each of the n sides has a plurality of tracks, and each side is divided into a plurality of sectors. A first set of servo information is written on an nth sector of a track on an nth side of said disk pack. This step is repeated for n=1 through n, for every sector of the track for each side of the disk pack. Next, data is erased from one of every n sectors of the track on each side of said disk pack. The entire process is repeated for a predetermined number of tracks on each side of the disk pack. In an alternate embodiment, the data is erased from a first track while the read/write heads of the hard disk drive are being moved from the first track to a second track.