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.