:walking drives: n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk
drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing
machine}s. 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.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
