Appeal No. 2004-0292
Application 09/726,369
independent claim 1's clause (b) has been amplified in the Reply
Brief to include the initial step in clause (a) of “calculating
which data sectors to be accessed are on a given track.”
Procedurally, the examiner has not had an opportunity to address
the argument as to this calculation feature because the examiner
is prohibited from doing so under the Rules of Practice in place
at the time the Answer was mailed. Appellants essentially argue
these same two features for independent claims 1 and 16 on appeal
in the Reply Brief. We are unpersuaded by these arguments.
At the outset, we note that appellants recognize at page 1
of the specification in discussing the Background of the
Invention that in the prior art each surface of a disk is divided
into several thousand tracks where each track is further broken
down into sectors. At page 3 of the Specification, appellants
recognize that defective sectors were mapped to a good sector in
another part of the same data storage area and that spare sectors
were reserved in disk drives as substitutes for these defective
sectors. Typically, it has been recognized that each track has
been allocated one spare sector at the end of the track.
Furthermore, it was recognized that a disk drive controller
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