Secure format of Hard Drive

[Betty Hardin]

We are eliminating the unix boxes (moved to windows). I need to securely format the drives on the unix box (HPUX 11i). How do I do that? (Best but quickest)

TIA,
Betty

[Pete Randall]

Betty,

Check this thread:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1024405


Pete

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Take the drives out and whack them with a hammer.

A reasonable level of disk wiping is:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c1t5d0 bs=64k

which will write all zeroes to the entire drive.

If you have the strong random number (KRG) software installed then this will write random data to the entire drive but it's slower:

dd if=/dev/urandom bs=256 of=/dev/rdsk/c1t5d0

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi Betty,

my commiseration for your decision to abandon the Unix platform in favour of Windows.

As Clay wrote, if you have the /dev/urandom installed, a triple dd pass over your disks would most likely render your disks' data unreadable to non-specialist data coronors.
If you need to fend them off as well you would have to physically destroy your disks to dust.

On Linux boxes there's the shred tool available for this purpose which is part of the GNU fileutils and thus maybe also compilable on other platforms?

http://www.gnu.org/software/fileutils/doc/manual/html/fileutils.html#shred%20invocation

[Court Campbell]

My funny suggestion is:

http://www.rare-earth-magnets.com/

these things should wipe the drives clean. Just remove the drives and stick these bad boys on the disk(s). Make sure you aren't around other equipment when you put them on the drives. They are really string.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

There is no totally secure way to insure this other than to send the hard disk to the smasher. That is what we do where I work now.

What I used to do in the past was a fresh install of the OS including all disks.

SEP

[Walt Watson]

We degauss (run across a large electromagnet) first and then smash them. We then break the disks into pieces and discard pieces into several separate disposal sites.

Actually its fairly fast to degauss them.