Recently, optical disk drives are increasingly demanded to have higher speed as well as high information density, especially for applications like CD ROM drives. To this end, improvement of their optical pickup structure and control is recognized the very challenging issue. In this paper, the pickup is first analytically modelled in a plane to describe its coupled auto-focusing and auto-tracking motions. Subsequently, the model is linearized and combined with actuator dynamics for the auto-focusing system. With its unmeasurable parameters being estimated based on experimental data, an approximate I-DOF linear model is obtained neglecting the coupling term. To design the high speed and robust positional servo controller realistic design specifications are addressed, and H control method is employed based on the approximate model. Finally, taking the pickup in a commerical high speed CD ROM drive as an example performance of the designed controller is verified through realtime experiments.