Related:

• farming n. [Adelaide University, Australia] What the heads of a disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media.
  Associated with a crash. Typically used as follow...
• crash: 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the {system} (q.
  v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happened when the air gap of a hard disk collapses)....
• crash 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q.
  v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses)....
• usty memory: n. Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp.
  ape and the pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in {washing machine}s)....
• oast: 1. n. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp.
  one that has just crashed and burned: "Uh, oh ....
• 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...
• fireworks mode: n. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a {crash and burn} operation.
  -- The AI Hackers Dictionary...
• boot v.,n. [techspeak; from `by one's bootstraps'] To load and initialize the operating system on a machine.
  This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon....
• maximum Maytag mode n. What a washing machine or, by extension, any disk drive is in when it's being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load.
  If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming walking drives....