Patent ID: 7133233

Claim:
A disk drive comprising: a recording media having one or more recording surfaces; one or more transducer heads; an actuator for positioning the transducer heads relative to the recording surfaces, operating within a head position servo loop; a preamplifier comprising: one or more head interfaces, each head interface electrically connected to a transducer head for controlling the transducer head for data read and/or write operations; and a mode controller electrically connected to each head interface for controlling the operation of each head interface based on configuration information for selectively reading data from at least one recording surface via at least one transducer head while writing final servo patterns to at least another recording surface via at least one transducer head; and a drive controller for controlling the actuator to position the transducer heads relative to the recording surfaces, and for providing the configuration information to the mode controller for selectively reading data from at least one recording surface via at least one transducer head while writing final servo patterns to at least another recording surface via at least one transducer head.