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Wiping out an HSZ22 (without a press drill)

 
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Olivier Masse
Honored Contributor

Wiping out an HSZ22 (without a press drill)

I spent years avoiding at all costs any interaction with a few RA3000 arrays which come with scary, nasty HSZ22 controllers that nobody wants to have business with here.

I've finally been given the go to turn everything off and send it to our surplus where it will probably be auctioned by weight.

I need, however, to be able to zap whatever data there is on it with something good enough but not necessarily military grade, and would prefer not having to boot OpenVMS to do an init/erase as this will take a while with all the servers that are hooked up to it.

SWCC doesn't seem to have any disk exerciser or dilx function, the only I thing I found that comes close is a "format disk" option when I log in directly to the text interface with a serial cable.

Anyone done this before and has suggestions? I'll hand points to whoever actually dares to answer!

Thanks
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Uwe Zessin
Honored Contributor
Solution

Re: Wiping out an HSZ22 (without a press drill)

Ah, welcome to the club of RA3000/HSZ22 arrays lovers ;-)

There is indeed an "ASCII menue" if you connect a terminal/emulator to the serial port. If I remember correctly you hit [ESC][&] and then enter the password "DECRAID".

Next comes a strange menue system (not D|I|G|I|T|A|L's invention as the box is based on the CMD "Anaconda").
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Olivier Masse
Honored Contributor

Re: Wiping out an HSZ22 (without a press drill)

Uwe, indeed I did that part with ESC-Shift-7 and I think I learned it from you -- I saw a few of your earlier posts on the HSZ22, they've been helpful, thanks! So 10 points to you.

I'm trying to see if the "format" option actually overwrites the whole disks. I don't care if it writes zeroes just once, that is enough. But if it just writes a header that's not good enough.

I might end up with a init/erase after all.

Thanks!
Olivier Masse
Honored Contributor

Re: Wiping out an HSZ22 (without a press drill)

Just for the record, after deleting the disks in SWCC I've been able to run a format by using the serial console and selecting all of the disks to have them formatted at once. It has been running for a while so I can guess it is probably writing data on the disks and checking if the writes are consistent. That's not military grade but good enough to destroy non-critical data.

Thanks
Olivier Masse
Honored Contributor

Re: Wiping out an HSZ22 (without a press drill)

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