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

[T. M. Louah]

Or simply use medianit :
mediainit initializes mass storage media by formatting the media,writing and reading test patterns to verify media integrity, then sparing any defective blocks found. This process prepares the disk or tape for error-free operation. Initialization destroys all existing user data in the area being initialized.

[Paul W Gronbach Jr]

I am in single user mode and trying to run mediainit on a disk in a disk array unit, all disks of which I want to init. the mediainit aborts because the device is busy. there is nothing on the drives. what do I need to do to set up the drives or controller to allow me to run mediainit? TIA

[Michael Schulte zur Sur]

Hi,

I would use dd either with /dev/zero or /dev/urandom. I remember reading somewhere, mediainit could render the disk useless, but I can't find it anymore.

Michael

[T. M. Louah]

?? in single user mode only vg00 is activated .. do :
# diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c#t#d#
On all LUNs on the disk array does it work ??