1. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the

system, especially of magnetic disk drives (the term

originally described what happened when the air gap of a hard

disk collapses). "Three lusers lost their files in last

night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the

read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and

scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a "head

crash", whereas the term "system crash" usually, though not

always, implies that the operating system or other software

was at fault.