Erasing Disk Drives

[Paul W Gronbach Jr]

Hi,
I have a HP9000/K380 that I want to totally erase everything from the drives. In addition to the internal drives it has 2 storage enclosures with drives that I also want to erase. Is there a utility around that will do multiple passes to wipe the drive (similar to Autoclave for IDE drives)? TIA

Paul Gronbach Jr
Iowa Mold Tooling Co.

[Bernhard Mueller · Accepted solution]

Paul

there is no such utility, I think the standard procedure is to use
umount /mount_point of /dev/vgxyz/lvol1
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/vgxyz/rlvol1 bs=1024k
and let it run until you get an I/O error (you can repeat this if you like, but usually that is considered to suffice)

Regards
Bernhard

[Mike Naime]

You might do a google search on DOD ERASE, or something similar.

Are you going to re-use the drives within your company? or are you looking to sell the hardware?

There was a thread on Comp.OS.VMS recently about this. The final analysis was that if you really wanted to destroy the data so that no-one could read this, A grinder or steal mill smelter was the only real solution!

I know of a guy that routinely takes a box of old disk drives to a local steel mill(with an escort), and they put the old drives into the smelter. Then they can take them off the books.

Another location has an industrial shredder that makes small bits out of the disk drives.

Ask this question -- If my competitor got a hold of these drives. How much would I stand to loose? Put a dollar value to that, and then destroy them.

There are people that make a living from extracting data from old hard disks.