Addressing the cylinders of a Hard Drive
The seek command only moves the head, but is not supported by more recently hard disk drivers, anyway maybe its worth trying.

Anyway if you can tolerate a read operation for example, you can calculate the position of the head by the track and sector. You can use a no retry read so if the read operation fails there's no retry.



In fact, just calculating the track may be sufficient.

More information on the commands and the interface can be found for example in this link.