Patent ID: 7304819

Claim:
A method for writing repeatable runout correction values to a magnetic disk of a disk drive having a head disk assembly (HDA) and a sampled servo controller, the HDA including an actuator, a transducer head and the magnetic disk having distributed position information in a plurality of embedded servo sectors for defining concentric tracks, the transducer head having a read element that is offset from a write element, the actuator for positioning the transducer head in response to a control effort signal from the sampled servo controller, the method comprising: positioning the write element over a target track while reading the distributed position information from a followed track using the read element, the target track being different from the followed track due to the offset between the read element and the write element, wherein previously determined RRO correction values are associated with the target track and previously determined RRO correction values are associated with the followed track; and writing the previously determined RRO correction values associated with the target track at radial positions on the target track, wherein the radial positions are based on the distributed position information of the followed track, the previously determined RRO correction values associated with the followed track, and at least a portion of the previously determined RRO correction values associated with the target track.