Patent ID: 7184230

Claim:
A method, comprising: reading a received track id from a disk; computing a track id differential between the received track id and an expected track id; Gray encoding the received track id and the expected track id, wherein the Gray-encoded received track id and the Gray-encoded expected track id each comprise a plurality of bits; detecting any mismatch between the bits of the Gray-encoded received track id and the bits of the Gray-encoded expected track id; initiating a first action if the track id differential exceeds a pre-determined threshold and the mismatch between the bits of the Gray-encoded received track id and the bits of the Gray-encoded expected track id is of a pre-configured number of bits; and initiating a second action if the track id differential exceeds a pre-determined threshold and the mismatch between the bits of the Gray-encoded received track id and the bits of the Gray-encoded expected track id is not of a pre-configured number of bits.