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by rr888 1197 days ago
Similarly its terrifying when you hear the drive clunking away on a bad disk when you know there will be an error before the screen shows it.
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In a lab that I hung out in as a student... there was a wang semi compatible (it only had 512k of base ram rather than 640k) that linux was ported to (there was some fun with LILO if I recall correctly).

This machine had a voice coil for its hard drive ( https://youtu.be/cs372pk2cGI for some disassembly of one of them ... and some nostalgia of a big drive chunking away) and when it did its seeking / calibration the hard drive would beep... not intentionally, but that's the sound it made.

The problem was, this was a rather flaky drive (swapping over NFS was faster than swapping to disk)... but eventually those bad blocks were isolated and files were allocated there... and moved to /beep on the system. If you went to /beep and cat'ed all the files, the hard drive would beep.