Patent ID: 8661193

Claim:
A disk drive comprising: a disk comprising a host addressable area and a reserved area, the host addressable area comprising a plurality of physical sectors, each physical sector associated with a plurality of logical block addresses (LBAs); an exception table stored in the reserved area; a head actuated radially over the disk to write data to the disk; and control circuitry coupled to the head, the control circuitry operable to: receive a first command from the host to write first host data into a first physical sector on the disk, wherein the first host data comprises an amount of data less than a full storage capacity of the first physical sector; detect an uncorrectable error while reading the first physical sector during a read-modify-write operation; and when an uncorrectable error is detected, indicate in the exception table that the first physical sector is a partial sector including valid and invalid LBAs, wherein the valid LBAs correspond to valid host data, and the invalid LBAs correspond to invalid host data.