Patent ID: 7174414

Claim:
A disk drive, comprising: a computer controlled by a program system including program steps residing in an accessibly coupled memory; a collection of physical tracks on at least two disk surfaces; wherein said disk drive maps a collection of logical track numbers to said collection of said physical tracks on said at least two disk surfaces; wherein said program system is comprised of the program steps of: determining a graycode offset for a read-write head accessing said disk surface, for each of said disk surfaces included in said disk drive; successively assigning said logical track numbers successively for each of said disk surfaces starting at said graycode offset for said read-write head accessing said disk surface to create an assigned physical track for said logical track number; determining a resident disk surface of a first of said logical track numbers as a first logical track number; determining said assigned physical track for said first logical track number; and said read-write head accessing said assigned physical track for said first logical track number of said resident disk surface; wherein for each of said disk surfaces, each of said physical tracks on said disk surface contains a unique graycode, and whenever two of said physical tracks are physically neighbors, the hamming distance between said graycodes of said two physical tracks is one.