Walking drives
jargon
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.
[Jargon File]
(2009-05-14)
Read Also:
- Walking encyclopedia
A very knowledgeable person, as in Ask Rob—he’s a walking encyclopedia of military history. A similar expression, a walking dictionary, was used by George Chapman in his poem “Tears of Peace” (c. 1600).
- Walking-fern
noun 1. a fern, Camptosorus rhizophyllus, having simple, triangular fronds tapering into a prolongation that bends at the top and often takes root at the apex. walking fern noun 1. a North American fern, Camptosorus rhizophyllus, having sword-shaped fronds, the tips of which take root when in contact with the ground: family Aspleniaceae
- Walking-fish
noun 1. any of various fishes able to survive and move about for short periods of time on land, as the mudskipper or climbing perch.
- Walking-leaf
noun 1. leaf insect. 2. walking fern.
- Walking-line
noun 1. a line on the plan of a curving staircase on which all treads are of a uniform width and that is considered to be the ordinary path taken by persons on the stair.