The present invention may be regarded as a disk drive comprising a disk having a plurality tracks, each track comprising a plurality of data sectors. If an error occurs while attempting to read one of the data sectors, a retry operation is executed in an attempt to recover the errant data sector. Averaged read data is generated over multiple retry operations, and the averaged read data processed to recover the errant data sector. In one embodiment, the averaged read data comprises an averaged binary sequence detected over multiple retry operations. In another embodiment, the averaged read data comprises averaged read signal sample values generated over multiple retry operations.