Disc drive power-up process including head mapping

Abstract

A logical-to-physical head map is built upon each power up of a disc drive. After powering the controller and disc drive spindle motor, a bias current is iteratively supplied to the read heads in succession. A representation of the voltage across each read head is stored in a fault register for comparison to a threshold and a “good” or “bad” fault status is stored for each head. A logical-to-physical head map is defined based on the number of logical heads, which in turn is based on the disc drive serial number. Each of the logical heads in the logical-to-physical head map is associated to a respective one of the heads having a “good” fault status to construct the logical-to-physical head map in the controller memory.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.