Disk Wipe Utility

[swatjason]

Does anyone know of any disk wipe utilities which will create a boot disk/cd that can be used to wipe all disks in an alpha/tru64 machine? If there are none that will create a boot disk/cd, then at least a utility that I can run from the system itself to wipe partitions and directories?

Thanks.

[swatjason]

Found some threads that cover this, in case anyone is ever looking in the future:

http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Tru64-UNIX-Managers/2005-09/0050.html

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1031079 (might have to copy/paste this one if the link doesn't work)

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/bizsupport/questionanswer.do?threadId=374669

[Ivan Ferreira]

You can boot with the installation cd, and select "Unix Shell". In the unix shell, you can use dd to erase the data:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk/dsk0c bs=256k skip=1

[swatjason]

I've been using the following to wipe my disks:

dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/disk/ bs=1024k

The first disk took about a day to wipe and ended with:

/: write failed, file system is full
dd: Reached end of medium. exiting...

Should I always expect to see that? I've been wiping the second disk for about four days now and it's still not done so I'm wondering why it's taking so long. I don't remember how big the partition was compared to the first one, but I know I didn't expect it to take nearly this long.

Also, how does a lower bs affect this? Finally, what's the advantage of using the skip option?

Thanks a lot.

[Ivan Ferreira]

>>> /: write failed, file system is full
>>> dd: Reached end of medium. exiting...

>>> Should I always expect to see that?

I think that you are not using the right device because:

1 - If you don't use the skip option, you should get an error. Tru64 won't allow write to the firsts blocks of the device so you must skip them.

2- You get a message "/: write failed, file system is full". When you write to write devices, you don't write to file systems, in this case the message is indicating that you are writing to a file system, this should mean that the device name you specified is incorrect and is creating a regular file in the /etc directory that is filling the root file system.

[swatjason]

Weird, it looks like you're right. The root partition is full. The exact command and error that I got was:

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/disk/disk4h bs=1024k
/: write failed, file system is full
dd: Reached end of medium. exiting...

disk4h is /rman, not root; so it looks like the device is right:

[sysadmin@banyan: fdmns]$ ls -la rman_domain
total 16
drwxr-xr-x 2 root system 8192 Sep 26 2002 ./
drwxr-xr-x 12 root system 8192 Sep 26 2002 ../
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root system 15 Sep 26 2002 dsk4h@ -> /dev/disk/dsk4h

From what I can tell the command looks correct (except for the -skip option). Any ideas?

[Hein van den Heuvel]

>>> of=/dev/disk/disk4h bs=1024k
:
>>> dsk4h@ -> /dev/disk/dsk4h

>> From what I can tell the command looks correct (except for the -skip option). Any ideas?

Yeah, an 'i' too much in disk4h.

The fact that / fills up proves something is wrong.

To be 100% sure I would recommend to always not only do the ls -l on the dd of target, but also to issue a 'file /dev/disk/dsk4h'

Regards,
Hein van den Heuvel