walking drives: n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk
drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing
machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular
momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings
and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to
`walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of
millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked
over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the
staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking
could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast
seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in
the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out
how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to
particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
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