PCT No. PCT / US97 / 04906 Sec. 371 Date Oct. 21, 1997 Sec. 102(e) Date Oct. 21, 1997 PCT Filed Mar. 27, 1997 PCT Pub. No. WO97 / 43835 PCT Pub. Date Nov. 20, 1997An apparatus and method for recovering from read errors detected by a read channel (70) in a sequence of data read from a disc (18) of a disc drive (10) by using read channel quality indicators to determine the appropriateness of using error correction in combination with other corrective actions utilized in the
recovery process. Upon the detection of an uncorrected error in the retrieved data, the disc drive (10) enters a read error
recovery routine wherein one or more corrective actions (102, 122) are applied in an effort to resolve the error. One of the channel quality indicators comprises a channel
quality measurement (108, 128) determined as the sum of the square of the sampled data bit error values recovered during the read operation. When the channel
quality measurement is at or below a threshold value indicative that the probability of passing undetected erroneous data is at an acceptable level (110, 130), error correction is applied to the data (112, 138); otherwise, error correction is disallowed (118, 140). Additional channel quality indicators comprise erasure pointers (132) which identify a particular set of symbols that are suspected of containing a read error. In such a case, the disc drive determines that the total number of symbols identified by the erasure pointers is below a predetermined erasure threshold before applying error correction (134, 136, 138), the erasure threshold selected to be within the correction capability of error correction circuitry 90.