topic Re: Wipe Disk Array in Disk Enclosures

Wipe Disk Array

Drew_20 — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 15:51:02 GMT

I have several servers from various manufactureres (mostly Compaq) with RAID5 configurations. The company is closing down and I need to start selling the servers. I need to "wipe" the drives. Wipe.exe works fine for workstations and basic SCSI but what can I use for drives on RAID controllers.

Re: Wipe Disk Array

clay bowman — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 16:37:29 GMT

Download the Erase Utility from the compaq.com\support web site. That should do it.

Re: Wipe Disk Array

Drew_20 — Wed, 16 Jul 2003 20:31:41 GMT

I have the CD and saw the system erase utility but I have found nothing to indicate that it will actually do a low level format or at least overwrite the drive with 0's. What is to stop someone from removing the drive installing it on a standard SCSI card and running a restore utility?

Re: Wipe Disk Array

scott fuhrman_2 — Thu, 17 Jul 2003 16:33:55 GMT

If you have the arrays hooked up to a Unix host, you could use the dd command and just completely write over everything on the device, or write random data.

Something like 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdx bs=1024k' or 'dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/sdx bs=1024k' would work, adjusting it to your needs.

Read up on dd if you are not familiar with it. This would write over the device at the block level, and make any previous data written very hard to access. Doing it multiple times would make it extremely hard to recover any real data, but is probably unecessary.

If you need the dd utility for windows, a ported version is available. See http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/#aboutdd for getting a copy of dd.exe. The syntax is a bit different for Windows devices, but it is very similar - just the paths would look different.

Hope this helps!

Scott

Re: Wipe Disk Array

Lucian Deuter — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 06:07:30 GMT

Drew,

the erase utility deletes the RAID configuration information at all places they are stored (NVRAM, RAID Controller and Disk). Without this data the disks can't be restored.

Re: Wipe Disk Array

Massimo Bianchi — Fri, 18 Jul 2003 07:42:28 GMT

Hi,
at boot, most scsi controller have a bios that let you do a low level format.

This should accomplish your needs.

Massimo