Developing a disk drive manufacturing program by executing the manufacturing program on an external test system

A method of manufacturing a disk drive, the disk drive comprising a disk, a head actuated radially over the disk, a host interface for receiving disk commands from a host system, a semiconductor memory for storing a drive operating program and a manufacturing program, the manufacturing program comprising platform independent executable code segments and disk access executable code segments, the drive operating program comprising a disk access procedure for processing disk commands and a disk access vector for calling the disk access procedure, the method comprising the steps of:

• (a) developing the manufacturing program on an external test system by performing the steps of:
• initiating a test program on an external test system, the test program comprising the platform independent executable code segments of the manufacturing program and host interface executable code segments;
• executing the platform independent executable code segments on the external test system;
• and
• executing the host interface executable code segments on the test system to send disk commands to a development drive;
• (b) executing the manufacturing program on the disk drive by performing the steps of:
• executing the platform independent executable code segments of the manufacturing program;
• and
• executing the disk access executable code segments of the manufacturing program to execute disk commands by calling the disk access procedure of the drive operating program through the disk access vector.