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There’s a fun story out there about software physically breaking a hard drive. At the time, this was actually quite difficult for drivers to avoid doing. So, wh

There’s a fun story out there about software physically breaking a hard drive. At the time, this was actually quite difficult for drivers to avoid doing. So, when a certain manufacturer came out with a drive it finally considered safe against driver errors, it proclaimed a bounty for anyone who could prove them wrong. The winner put the drive on a table, connected with a cable, but not attached to a case. Then he wrote a routine that slammed the read head to one side, then slowly moved it back. Each time the routine looped, the drive would scoot across the table until it finally fell off the edge.

jedimastert 8y ago
That's really funny, and something I want to see. It sounds like a SIGBOVIK paper
themodelplumber 8y ago
Back in 1993 I was thumbing through a book about assembly programming for MS-DOS, and it seemed that you could theoretically cause all kinds of hardware problems. IIRC the method that stood out to me at the time was intentionally accelerating disk drive motors. Were there built-in limits? On some drives or all? The book didn't say. I'm still not sure I read that right, but man was it fascinating to think about all the control one could wield over the head of one's high school electronics teacher and his room full of new PC's.
prewett 8y ago
That reminds me of the IBM "Black Team" QA group story where a guy writes a perfect tape drive driver, formally verified and everything. The "Black Team" was annoyed they couldn't find a problem with it, so they wrote a program to spin the tape at the cabinet's resonant frequency, until the cabinet eventually fell over. http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html http://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html
- m_samuel_l 8y ago
  That's a hardware issue.