Formatting Drives (Clearing Tru64)

[Paul Stanard]

My company is done testing the Alpha that I have been working on for the past month or so. We are planning to purchase a newer alpha (the one we rented is from production yr 1996) Does anyone know how to clear the OS from the drives? Any suggestions on the type of Alpha we should look into purchasing? I can give more details of the what we need to box to do if needed.

[Paul Stanard]

Would booting to the console..entering the AlphaBios Setup and deleting the partitions clear off all the data on the box

[Michael Schulte zur Sur · Accepted solution]

Hi Paul,

to wipe the machine clean, boot from installation cdrom, exit to shell and use
dd if=/dev/zero of=/devices/dsk/dsk0c bs=1024k

for all disks you have.
However, if you did not put any company data on it, why bother?

Michael

[Paul Stanard]

I put about 13Gb of company data on it last week

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Then use
showfdmn -k "datadomain"
where the data are and
use the dd command to erase them.
Run the dd command 5 times.

Michael

[Ravi_8]

Hi Paul

remove the vmunix and it's copies.

shutdown the machine, if the machine is booted again. system will not come up as there is no kernel file. when the user reinstall the OS all the data in the disk will be lost.

buy the latest model,
http://hp.com
look in servers link

[Eric van Dijken]

Ravi,

That would make the disk unbootable, but the data will still be there. You would only have to boot from an install cdrom. escape to the shell and you can access the data.

The "dd" method is a good one.

[Joris Denayer]

Maybe you can use the scu command to do a low-level format of the disk. Don't know if this works for HS[ZGV] connected disks.

Start from the installation CD
# dn_setup -boot
find the devicename of the disk to be cleared
# scu -f /dev/rdisk/dsk??c format

This should issue a "format pack" SCSI-command.

I don't know if this will be faster than the dd-trick.

Joris

[Ralf Puchner]

if the data is sensible, format drive with scu command or use dd to overwrite the data.

if there is no critical data on the drives, use dd write 1-2 MB to the partitions and clear the partitiontable.

[Joris Denayer]

Paul,

FWIW:
Formatting or overwriting is not bad to start with.
However, there will still leave remnants of magnetism that can be recovered with very specialised tools.
I heard that these remnants will be gone after ~35 overwritings.
US Department of Defense recommends 3 overwrites.

Of course, your mileage may vary.

Joris