Appeal No. 2004-0292
Application 09/726,369
kept track of all these defective sectors and automatically
substituted each of the defective sectors with a spare or good
sector. Lastly, it was also recognized at the bottom of page 4
of the Specification that in the prior art “the firmware can
simply calculate based on the pointer locations and amount of
data transferred, what to reset the pointers to, to repeat a
transfer.” This teaching recognizes that the prior art already
used firmware to control calculation aspects and the pointer
locations were known to exist in the prior art with respect to
disk sectoring and track accessing approaches.
With this in mind, the first paragraph of AHP at page 121
indicates that entire skip masks are stored in random access
memory (RAM) “registers” which are in turn accessible to the
sector generation hardware shown in figure 1. This is all stated
to be controlled by firmware. In the second paragraph, it is
indicated that these “RAM-based tables which store defect data
for the disk pack” exist. Thus, the skip mask pattern discussed
in the first paragraph at page 121 of AHP storing skip masks in
the tables is done for the entire disk pack, which implicitly
requires that it be done for each of the tracks and each of the
sectors for each track.
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