A system and method for logging and storing failure analysis information on disk drive so that the information is readily and reliably available to vendor customer service and other interested parties is provided. The information, in an illustrative embodiment, is stored on a nonvolatile (flash) random access memory (RAM), found generally in most types of disk drives for storage of updateable disk drive firmware. A known location of limited size is defined in the flash RAM, to form a scratchpad. This scratchpad is a blank area of known addresses, formed during the original firmware download onto the memory, and which is itself free of firmware code. This scratchpad is sufficient in size to write a series of failure codes in a non-erasable list as failures/errors (and user/administrator attempts to unfail the disk) are logged. The log of failures always travels with the drive, and can be read by the vendor to determine the general nature of the most recent failure(s) and whether these failures represent a problematic history for the drive.