Patent ID: 7319652

Claim:
An optical disk drive for conducting any one or both of the information recording and reproducing operations to and from an optical disk through an optical pickup, comprising: a stepping motor for moving said optical pickup almost in the radius direction of said optical disk; a motor drive circuit for driving said stepping motor; a sampling circuit for forming sampling signals by sampling a drive current or a drive voltage of said stepping motor outputted from said motor drive circuit during movement of said optical pickup; and a control circuit for detecting change of said sampling signals by comparing the value of a sampling signal formed by sampling a first stepping pulse with the value of a sampling signal formed by sampling a second stepping pulse adjacent to the first stepping pulse and controlling said motor drive circuit based on a result of said detection; wherein, when the difference between said two values of said sampling signals is more than a predetermined value, said control circuit controls said motor drive circuit and the movement of said optical pickup based on information of said sampling signals formed by the sampling of the first and second adjacent stepping pulses.