topic Re: itanium, how to dd system disk in Operating System - HP-UX

itanium, how to dd system disk

D O'Callaghan — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:53:36 GMT

Hi
I want to blank the system disk on an Itainium SX200 Super Dome.

Is it possible to boot from a cdrom or ignite into single user mode and write the disks with zeros using dd ?

Thanks
Dan

Re: itanium, how to dd system disk

butti — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:03:24 GMT

Hi,

have a look at DRD.

http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-5856/index.html

-Butti

Re: itanium, how to dd system disk

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 14:24:36 GMT

Shalom,

Yes, get the boot device from:
lvlnboot -v

prior to going single user.

This is not a good method however.

Better to do a generic OS install into the boot disk.

SEP

Re: itanium, how to dd system disk

smatador — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:08:13 GMT

Hi,
Well, If I understand you want to be sure that a system disk would be never recoverable.

If you have two disk, boot on a good one and dd the bad disk is easy but if you asking for boot cdrom or ignite ...
I could suppose you have one disk only, the bad systeme disk which it's not bootable, I think you have to
1 - boot on a recovery shell mode [ ignite or cdrom ]
2 - load file dd if is not present on the recovery shell [ not sure ]
3 - recognize your disk with ioscan
4 - dd the bad disk
If the bad disk have a good system on it, you could try to boot single and made a dd on it.
HTH

Re: itanium, how to dd system disk

rick jones — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:31:47 GMT

If you want the contents of the disc to be "never" recoverable, then you need to physically destroy the disc, especially the oxide coatings on the platter(s).

If all you want to do is make it "really difficult" then booting from alternate media and scribbling all-over the disc several times with different patterns may suffice.

However, my recollection of past discussions is that "spared sectors" will not get wiped by scribbling via stuff like dd...

Re: itanium, how to dd system disk

Viktor Balogh — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 13:25:17 GMT

I think you do not need to restart your system in single user mode, nor to boot from another media. You can dd the disks directly. At least that's the way we do it for our customer. After dd'ing the disk you only need to shutdown the system. The main system won't have problems since it's in memory.