On 2008-04-24 09:15 +0100, Simon Owen wrote:

On Mon, Apr 21, 2008 at 9:39 PM, Andre Majorel aym-xunil@teaser.fr wrote:

...

The WD1770 and friends had a useful read track command, apparently carried over from the 1791 :

With normal sector commands, the address mark detector is enabled only when looking for header or data fields. With WD17xx read track it's enabled for the whole command, causing it to resync to bit sequences found elsewhere on the disk (header, data or gaps).

Read track is good for poking a bit deeper, but it's useless for doing byte-level dumping of tracks. Try it on track 41 of any disk and you'll see it trip up when it hits the track number in the first header field!

I wasn't aware of that ! Thanks.