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walking drives

   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.