Some Windows XP-era laptops that used 5400 RPM spinning hard drives failed when Janet Jackson’s 1989 hit “Rhythm Nation” was played.
Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen explained the full story in a blog post published earlier this week, and the vulnerability received an official CVE ID by The Miter Corporation.
According to Chen, CVE-2022-38392 was originally discovered by “a major computer manufacturer”Y It can affect not only the laptop that is playing the music, but also adjacent laptops from other PC brands.
The specific hard drive model in question – again from an unidentified manufacturer – was crashing because “Rhythm Nation” used some “natural resonance frequencies” of disk drives, interfering with its operation.
Here is our first video of our new series with Raymond Chen, @ChenCravat.
We asked him to tell us about the mystery where some songs crashed a laptop!!?? pic.twitter.com/BRgfsWEaaC
— Windows Development Documents (@WindowsDocs) August 12, 2022
It’s not easy to recreate the problem today
Anyone trying to recreate this problem independently will encounter a number of obstacles, such as the age of the laptops involved and a complete lack of specificity about hard drives or computer models.
The CVE entry mentions “a 5400 RPM specific OEM hard drive shipped with laptops around 2005” and link to Chen’s post as the main source.
While some Windows XP-era laptop hard drives may still be working somewhere, after nearly two decades, most of them probably died of natural causes.
Apparently, the problem was also partially resolved by the PC manufacturer at the time. Chen claims that the company solved the problem”adding a custom filter on the audio channel that detected and removed offending frequencies during audio playback.”
That didn’t completely solve things, since these laptops’ hard drives kept failing if they were exposed to another device playing the music. But “Rhythm Nation” had apparently waned enough in popularity by the early 2000s that the problem wasn’t widespread.
Sound frequencies can interfere with the operation of spinning hard drives, as demonstrated in this popular old YouTube video of a man increasing drive latency and undermining performance by yelling at a server rack.