topic Re: Wipe disk drives. in Operating System - HP-UX

Wipe disk drives.

Jeffrey F. Goldsmith — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 16:57:56 GMT

I am going to be retiring my D380 server within the next couple of weeks and wanted to know if there was any procedure to wipe the hard drives. At this point I don’t think that there is any useful information on the hard drives but I want to ensure that there isn’t anything on them before they leave our office.

Thanks for the help.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Dave La Mar — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 17:04:23 GMT

Jeff -
We just went through that with an XP512 and dd was the preference. You will find many posts supplementing this and other ways.
It just seemed to be the best fit for us though it was time consuming due to the number of disks involved.
For you, it would be a small task.

Best of luck.

Regards,

-dl

Re: Wipe disk drives.

James R. Ferguson — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 17:06:04 GMT

Hi Jeffrey:

One solution is to write zeros or some random pattern at least once over the disk. This is a "reasonable" destruction for most.

# dd if=/dev/zeros of=/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=1024k

or:

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=dev/rdsk/CxtYdZ bs=1024k

Note the use of the raw disk device to circumvent the LVM layer. Note, too, the use of a large blocksize for fast I/O.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Jeffrey F. Goldsmith — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:40:22 GMT

I tried to do the dd command to clear my drives but it didnt seem to work. What am I doing wrong? Here is what happened.

root: / ==> dd if=/dev/zeros of=/dev/rdsk/c6t3d0 bs=1024k
/dev/zeros: No such file or directory
dd: cannot open /dev/zeros
root: / ==> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/rdsk/c6t3d0 bs=1024k
/dev/urandom: No such file or directory
dd: cannot open /dev/urandom

Do I need to create a file called "zeros" and "urandom"?

Thanks.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Kent Ostby — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:43:25 GMT

you have to configure in the "rng" driver to the kernel and create device files that look like this:

cr--r--r-- 1 bin bin 62 0x000000 May 10 18:09 /dev/random
cr--r--r-- 1 bin bin 62 0x000001 May 10 18:09 /dev/urandom

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Kent Ostby — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:44:37 GMT

To get /dev/zero, you would create the device file:

mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000004

I believe it's /dev/zero not /dev/zeros.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

baiju_3 — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:46:46 GMT

As Kent told it is /dev/zero .

thx,
bl.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Jeffrey F. Goldsmith — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:50:29 GMT

I found the /dev/zero and started with the last hard drive. Do you know how long it takes to perform this operation? I have 21 external hard drives and they are only 4GB each.

Thanks

Re: Wipe disk drives.

James R. Ferguson — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:52:38 GMT

Hi Jeffrey:

Sorry, Kent is correct, the device file is '/dev/zero' without the "s" I inadvertantly added.

You don't say what release you are running.

To see hwat minor devices you have, do:

# lssf /dev/* 2> /dev/null|grep "mm"

If you are running 10.20, you will need to do:

# mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000003

On 11.0, use:

# mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000004

You should have /dev/zero on 11.11 and later.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Wipe disk drives.

baiju_3 — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:54:10 GMT

No need of filling your entire disk with zeros.

Do a pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/c?t?d? ,

Do this using a shell script , this will be much faster than writing zeros .

Thanks,
Bl.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Artyom Voronchihin — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 13:59:07 GMT

Hello!

You can also use mediainit command (man mediainit(1) for further info).
Example:
# mediainit /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0

Re: Wipe disk drives.

baiju_3 — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 14:00:33 GMT

One suggestion ,

mediainit is low level format , not recommened.

thx,
bl.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Victor Fridyev — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 16:24:26 GMT

Hi,

In addition to the proposed ideas you can just copy a system disk onto the "data" drives.
dd if=/dev/rdsk/cXXXX of=/dev/rdsk/cYYYY bs=32768k

HTH

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Sheriff Andy — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 17:00:27 GMT

If you truly want to wipe the disks then you need to use dd & not pvcreate.

Look up KB doc ID KBRC00010654. This might be of some assistance as it was for us.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Florian Heigl (new acc) — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 18:17:40 GMT

I think dd will suffice for what You want, it will overwrite the whole disks with zeroes and a regular computer user (like You, me, and 90% of us)won't be able to recover anything from it.

Otherwise see the attachment to my post in this older thread:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=957297

Re: Wipe disk drives.

the9volt — Wed, 03 Feb 2021 17:57:42 GMT

great information.. this is from 2005.. can we get some updated insctructions for those of us who are not using Linux too.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

Torsten. — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 16:49:19 GMT

Open your own thread please.

Re: Wipe disk drives.

the9volt — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 16:52:45 GMT

A new thread was unnecessary. You can wipe drives from opening the same menu from bootup. it's just really slow with the HP utility. If you can get into an OS setting I recomend that, HP's wiping tool is slow AF

Re: Wipe disk drives.

the9volt — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 17:21:54 GMT

Also HP's ILOM web interface on gen9 does not work. You can't open a console via the web interface. You have to download the ilom utility from here:

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_4f842ceb31cf48d392e22705a8

Upon bootup select the F10/intelligent configuration option then choose smart storage administrator. Browse through the storage administrator tool and there is an "erase drive" option where you can select how many passes to meet DOD standards.

it'd be nice if official forum personnel could give answers like that =P