topic Re: wipe disk utility in Operating System - HP-UX

wipe disk utility

Grant Wenstrand — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 16:22:55 GMT

Is anyone aware of a "wipe disk utility" for HP-UX in a classified environment?

Thanks,

Grant

Re: wipe disk utility

Rick Garland — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 17:04:03 GMT

Can use mediainit MULTIPLE times

Re: wipe disk utility

Grant Wenstrand — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 17:13:09 GMT

Thanks Rick. I looked at the manpages for mediainit, but I am still unclear. What if I want to wipe the root partition as well? It should be easy to do it once, but how do I do it multiple times?

Thanks,

Grant

Re: wipe disk utility

Alan Riggs — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 17:26:27 GMT

mediainit cannot be used to wipe an active root partition. You can. however, boot to a recovery shell from the support CD and wipe the root disk from there.

Re: wipe disk utility

Rick Garland — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 18:06:07 GMT

Alan has it. Can use mediainit to wipe a disk clean with exception of root disk/partition. Do it multiple times as once does not ensure that the data a clean/unrecoverable wipe.

Re: wipe disk utility

Tim Malnati — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 20:49:12 GMT

Be careful here. If you are talking about government/military classification, there are all sorts of documented requirements which come into play. Depending on the level of classification, absolute destruction of the drives may be required (and even that's spelled out). Although mediainit will do the job, you may be in a situation where a certified product may be required.

Re: wipe disk utility

Grant Wenstrand — Mon, 31 Jul 2000 21:25:23 GMT

You are absolutely right Tim. In this particular case destruction of the hard drives isn't necessary, but you raise an interesting point.

Does anyone know if mediainit is certified for military/government? Do additional solutions exist? My searches on the net have only yielded results for Intel-based solutions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Grant

Re: wipe disk utility

Michael Lampi — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 16:14:58 GMT

Mediainit is not adequate in most cases to remove all classified data from a disk drive. The problem is that it is possible for a disk block containing classified data to be placed in the "bad block" list automatically by the disk drive in the course of it recovering from an I/O error. Someone could at a later time potentially recover data from this block.

There are some tools available in the PC world that can be used to overwrite the user data blocks with a pattern and overwrite the bad blocks with a pattern. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such tools for HP-UX at this time.

Re: wipe disk utility

Grant Wenstrand — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 20:33:23 GMT

I was afraid of this.

Thank you all for your input.

Cheers,

Grant

Re: wipe disk utility

Tim Malnati — Wed, 02 Aug 2000 22:17:43 GMT

You could always bring the drive down to your local auto junk yard and place it under their lifting magnet. Don't laugh, I know someone who did this a while back to take care of a pickup truck full of old 9 track tapes. He just layed them out by the boxful. Don't wear your watch though.

Re: wipe disk utility

Robert R. Colp — Thu, 03 Aug 2000 18:40:34 GMT

Grant-

A software package IS available for HP-UX 9.x and 10.x from Los Altos Technologies. The Software is called UniShred Pro. You can get more info at www.lat.com. It does do a DOD erase. No, I do not work for them, I researched this for the DOD computers I use!

Re: wipe disk utility

Grant Wenstrand — Thu, 03 Aug 2000 20:57:45 GMT

Robert,

Thanks for the information. This product looks as if it will work for us.

Thanks,

Grant