Chickens. Sacrifice a chicken to the hardware and it will work. Well, as long as it's a SCSI drive, other hardware can be fussy about which sacrifices they want (one device insists that it has to be human blood, and takes it from me whenever I approach it).
Other time it can be enough just to threaten the device: "I have a screwdriver and soldering iron and I'm not afraid to use them!" In fact my sister's system is so terrified of me that she only has to threaten to call me to get its cooperation. Some hardware is easily intimidated...
(I'm an animist, I believe that everything responds to being talked to. I also thank things when they do something for me, so I say thank you to ticket machines and photocopiers when they give me the appropriate bits of paper, and to the car after a journey. This gets me some strange looks from some cow-orkers and other people who don't know me...)
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Other time it can be enough just to threaten the device: "I have a screwdriver and soldering iron and I'm not afraid to use them!" In fact my sister's system is so terrified of me that she only has to threaten to call me to get its cooperation. Some hardware is easily intimidated...
(I'm an animist, I believe that everything responds to being talked to. I also thank things when they do something for me, so I say thank you to ticket machines and photocopiers when they give me the appropriate bits of paper, and to the car after a journey. This gets me some strange looks from some cow-orkers and other people who don't know me...)