JPH04177671A - Controlling method for disk device - Google Patents

Abstract

PURPOSE:To suitably decide system information by discriminating normal end of initialization of a recording medium under the conditions that both form at start/complete flags are set at the time of accessing data. CONSTITUTION:When a format command is received from a host system through a host INF 21, format complete flags FFE are reset for all system parameters of all system information, and a format start flag FFS is set. Then, a predetermined format work for user area of a magnetic disk is conducted. When the format work is finished, the format complete flag FFE is set, and the format work is finished. A controller 20 accesses the disk only when both the FFS and the FFE are set. Thus, data accessing in a state that the initialized state of the disk or system information are incomplete can be prevented to prevent any malfunction from accurring.

Description

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION [Field of Industrial Application] The present invention relates to a method of controlling a disk device that is capable of replacing data erasable disk-shaped recording media.

[Prior Art] In general, in a disk device in which a disk-shaped recording medium from which data can be erased is exchanged, such as a magneto-optical disk device or a medium-exchangeable magnetic disk device, data is stored in a predetermined system area of the recording medium. It records system information such as information indicating the data format of the recording medium and information indicating the relationship between a defective area on the recording medium and an alternative area to replace it (mapping information).

This system information is read by a magneto-optical disk device or a magnetic disk device equipped with a recording medium, and is used as basic data of the recording medium when accessing data.

Furthermore, by recording the same system information in multiple locations on the recording medium, even if a defect occurs in the recording medium after it is shipped from the factory, the system information can be appropriately obtained.

[Problems to be Solved by the Invention] However, such conventional devices have the following disadvantages.

That is, for example, if an accident such as a power outage occurs during the initialization operation of the recording medium, the initialization process of the recording medium and the replacement process for the defective area are incompletely completed, and the recording medium becomes defective after that. If this occurs and some system information becomes unreadable, the system information may not have been able to be read due to incomplete initialization processing, or it may be due to a defect in the recording medium. It is not possible to determine whether the data could not be read, resulting in the inconvenience that appropriate recovery processing cannot be performed.

Furthermore, it is not possible to determine whether or not the system information that has been read is incomplete, which may lead to inappropriate data access.

The present invention has been made in view of the above circumstances, and an object of the present invention is to provide a method for controlling a disk device that can appropriately determine system information.

[Means for Solving the Problems] The present invention provides a formatting start flag that is set in a predetermined system information area of a recording medium at the time of starting execution of a command related to medium initialization processing, and a formatting start flag that is set at the end of execution of the command. A format completion flag is formed, and it is determined that the initialization of the recording medium has been completed normally on the condition that both the format start flag and the format completion flag are set when data is accessed. .

[Effects] Therefore, accessing the recording medium based on system information formed before the initialization process has been completed normally is prohibited, and erroneous data access operations can be prevented.

[Embodiments] Hereinafter, embodiments of the present invention will be described in detail with reference to the accompanying drawings.

FIG. 1 shows a magnetic disk according to an embodiment of the present invention.

This magnetic disk 1 is housed in a disk cartridge (not shown) and is loaded into a medium exchange type magnetic disk device to record/reproduce data.
On both sides of the recording surface, there are many recording cylinders (
A track) is formed, and the system information of the magnetic disk 1 is recorded on the innermost recording cylinder. Furthermore, the same system information is recorded on both recording cylinders.

Furthermore, the data format of each recording cylinder is set in such a manner that 38 data sectors of a predetermined data length are arranged, for example, as shown in FIG. It is set as an alternative sector to replace the data sector determined as a defective area.

If there is one defective sector on a recording cylinder, that defective sector is replaced by a replacement sector on the same recording cylinder. Additionally, if there are two or more defective sectors in a recording cylinder, one defective sector is replaced by a replacement sector from the same cylinder, and the other defective sectors are replaced by replacement sectors from the next recording cylinder in sequence. .

FIG. 3(a) shows an example of system information recorded on the innermost recording cylinder.

This system information consists of two system parameters with the same contents that store the initialization status of the recording medium and the data format of the recording medium, a pad list consisting of a list of defective sectors, each defective sector and an alternative to replace it. It consists of a replacement table that stores relationships between sectors, and a replacement sector pad list that includes list information of replacement sectors where defects have occurred.

In addition, as shown in FIG. 5B, the system parameters include a format start flag FFS that is set at the start of format-related processing such as initialization processing and sector replacement processing, and a format start flag FFS that is set at the end of format-related processing. It consists of a format completion flag FFE, format information for storing the format of this recording medium, and other predetermined parameters.

FIG. 4 shows a schematic configuration of a medium exchange type magnetic disk device according to an embodiment of the present invention.

In the figure, a turntable 4 for fixing a magnetic disk 1 is disposed at the tip of a rotating shaft 3 of a spindle motor 2. Magnetic heads 5 and 6 for recording/reproducing data are mounted on a carriage 10 attached to a voice coil motor 9 via arm members 7 and 8. radially moved.

Further, the magnetic disk 1 is attached to and detached from the turntable 4 by a loading mechanism (not shown).

FIG. 5 shows an example of a control system of the magnetic disk device shown in FIG.

In the figure, a control unit 20 controls the operation of each part of this magnetic disk device, and also includes a host device (path shown) such as a personal computer that uses a magnetic disk.
The host interface circuit 21 is used to exchange various information between the control unit 20 and the host device.

The data recording circuit 22 is for generating a recording signal corresponding to data to be recorded on the magnetic disk 1 using the magnetic heads 5 and 6, and the recording signal is amplified by a write amplifier 23 and then sent to the head. The signal is applied to either one of the magnetic heads 5 and 6 via the switch 24.

The reproduction signal from the magnetic head 5 or magnetic head 6 is
The signal is applied to a read amplifier 25 via a head switch 24, amplified, and then applied to a data reproducing circuit 26. The data reproducing circuit 26 extracts reproduced data from the reproduced signal and outputs it to the control section 20.

The position sensor 27 is for detecting the position of the carriage 7 in the magnetic disk radial direction, and sends a detection signal S.
P is added to the control section 20. The speed sensor 28 detects the rotational speed of the spindle motor 2, and its detection signal PS is applied to the control section 2o.

Further, the work memory 29 is used by the control unit 20 as a work area, such as a data buffer.

With the above configuration, upon receiving a format command from the host device, the control section 20 executes the processing shown in FIG. 6.

That is, when a format command is received from the host device (process 101), the command format is checked and if it is a normal command (the result of judgment 102 is YES),
For all system parameters of all system information, the format completion flag FFE is reset and the format start flag FFS is set (processing 1o2).

Then, a predetermined formatting operation is performed on the user area other than the innermost recording cylinder of the magnetic disk 1 (process 104). This formatting operation also involves finding a defective sector and replacing the defective sector.

When such formatting work is completed, the contents of all system information are rewritten based on the work results at that time (process 105), and the format completion flag FF is set for all system parameters of all system information.
E is set (process 106), and the formatting operation is completed.

Further, when the format command received from the host device is invalid and the result of judgment 102 is NO,
An error status indicating a command error is set internally (processing 107), and the process ends with an error. In this case, the host device is notified of the error status and reports that the formatting operation was not performed.

In this way, at the start of the formatting work, the formatting start flag FFS included in the system parameters of the system information is set, and the formatting completion flag FFE is reset, and when the formatting work is finished, the formatting completion flag FFE is set. Set.

Therefore, by checking the formatting start flag FFS and formatting completion flag FFE, it is possible to determine whether or not the formatting work of the magnetic disk 1 has been completed normally.

FIG. 7 shows processing related to a sector replacement command output when a defective sector found by the host device is replaced with any replacement sector.

First, when a sector replacement command is received (process 201)
, check the command format and if it is a normal command (
If the result of judgment 202 is YES], system information inspection processing (
Process 203) is executed.

When the system information inspection process ends normally, the format completion flag FFE is reset and the format start flag FFS is set for all system parameters of all system information (process 204).

Then, a task is performed to replace the defective sector specified by the host device with a corresponding replacement sector (processing 205).
, based on the work results at that time, rewrites the contents of all system information (process 206), sets the format completion flag FFE for all system parameters of all system information (process 207), and performs the formatting work. finish.

Further, when the format command received from the host device is invalid and the result of judgment 202 is NO,
An error status indicating a command error is set internally (processing 2O8), and the process ends with an error.

In this way, at the start of the sector replacement work, the format start flag FFS included in the system parameters of the system information is set, and the format completion flag FFE is reset, and when the format work is finished, the format completion flag FFE is set. is set.

FIG. 8 shows an example of the system information inspection process.

As described above, this system information checking process is performed not only immediately before executing the sector replacement command, but also when a command other than the format command is received. Then, the specified command is executed only when this system information inspection process ends normally.

First, it is checked whether reading of system information has already been completed at that time (determination 301), and if the result of determination 301 is YES, this process is normally terminated.

When the result of judgment 301 is NO, an operation is performed to read all system information (process 302), and it is checked whether two or more pieces of system information have been read (decision 303).

When the result of judgment 303 is YES, check whether the contents of all system information match (decision 30).
4) If the result of determination 304 is YES, this process is normally terminated.

When the result of judgment 304 is No, a status is set internally to alert the media server (processing 30
5), this process ends with an error. In this way, when the process ends with an error, operations related to data access on the magnetic disk I are prohibited from then on.

Also, if the number of system information that could be read is 1 or 0,
When the result of judgment 303 is NO, check whether the number of system information that could be read is 1 (decision 306).
), when the result of judgment 306 is NO, it means that the system information could not be read, so the process moves to process 305 and ends with an error.

When the result of judgment 306 is YES, it is checked whether the format start flag FFS is set (judgment 307), and when the result of judgment 307 is NO, the process moves to process 305 and this process ends with an error. do.

When the result of judgment 307 is YES, it is checked whether the error completion flag FFE is set (judgment 3).
08), when the result of judgment 308 is YES, it is assumed that the system information read at that time is normal, and this process is normally terminated.

Further, when the result of the judgment 308 is NO, a status is set internally to prohibit the data recording operation and to permit only the data reading operation (processing 309).
), this process ends normally.

In this way, in this system information inspection process, if two or more pieces of system information recorded on the magnetic disk 1 can be read, the system information is determined to be normal only if the contents of the system information are compared and match. , so using the system information including the error,
A situation in which data is accessed on the magnetic disk 1 can be prevented.

In addition, if one piece of system information recorded on the magnetic disk l can be read, the format start flag FF is
Since the system information is determined to be normal only when both S and format completion flag FFE are set, the system is formed with format processing or sector replacement processing incompletely completed. Using the information, it is possible to prevent a situation where data is accessed on the magnetic disk 1.

By the way, when the data recording prohibition status is set and a data read command is issued from the host device, the specified data area is accessed and the data is read out, but when the data recording command is issued, , it responds with a media error and does not execute the command.

Therefore, in that case, the data recorded on the magnetic disk 1 can be read to a certain extent, so that the data can be protected to a certain extent.

As explained above, according to this embodiment, data access to the magnetic disk can be performed only when the system information is determined to be normal, so the initialization state of the magnetic disk or the system information is Data access in an incomplete state can be prevented.

Incidentally, in the embodiments described above, the present invention is applied to a medium exchange type magnetic disk device, but the present invention can be similarly applied to other medium exchange type disk devices.

Further, the present invention can be similarly applied to disk devices having formats other than those described above.

[Effects of the Invention] As explained above, according to the present invention, it is prohibited to access a recording medium based on system information that is formed before the initialization process has been completed normally, and data access is prohibited. The effect is that malfunctions can be prevented.

[Brief explanation of drawings]

Fig. 1 is a schematic diagram showing an example of a magnetic disk, Fig. 2 is a schematic diagram illustrating the format of a recording cylinder, and Fig.
Figure (a) is a schematic diagram showing an example of system information, and Figure (b) is a schematic diagram showing an example of system information.
) is a schematic diagram showing an example of system parameters, FIG. 4 is a schematic diagram showing a medium exchange type magnetic disk device according to an embodiment of the present invention, and FIG. 5 is a schematic diagram showing a control system of the device shown in FIG. 4. FIG. 6 is a flowchart showing an example of formatting operation, FIG. 7 is a flowchart showing an example of sector replacement operation, and FIG. 8 is a flowchart showing an example of system information inspection processing.

Claims (3)

[Claims] (1) In a method for controlling a disk device that is capable of replacing data-erasable disc-shaped recording media, a formatting start flag is set in a predetermined system information area of the recording medium at the time of starting execution of a command related to media initialization processing. ,
A format completion flag is set at the end of the command execution, and the initialization of the recording medium is completed normally on the condition that both the format start flag and format completion flag are set when data is accessed. 1. A method for controlling a disk device, characterized by determining. (2) A plurality of the system information areas are formed, and when the contents of at least one system information area can be read, the initialization of the recording medium is determined based on the contents of the system information area. 1. The method of controlling a disk device according to 1. (3) The method for controlling a disk device according to claim 1, wherein the command related to the medium initialization process includes a replacement process command for replacing a defect occurring in the recording medium with a predetermined replacement part.