This reminds me of something I read once.
In his book, Takedown, Tsutomu Shimomura (forgive me if that's spelled wrong)
wrote a few short paragraphs about how he was able to move the head-arm of a
magnetic disk drive back and forth with software commands. He could tell the
head-arm to go to any cylinder on the drive, he wondered what would happen if
he tried to send it to a cylinder that was outside the physical limits of the
drive. He told the drive (a 200 cylinder drive) to goto cylinder 4000. The
drive actually tried to go to that cylinder and caused a hardware failure in
the process.
Is it still possible for software to damage hardware in this fashion or is
hardware smarter now? Do drives know not to try and access a cylinder that is
outside their physical limits?
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