walking drives

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.