Cleaning data from discontinued HPUX diskdrives

[Leslie Fischer]

Have a HP9000 with Disk enclosed sub-system. Which were used for a financial application. What is the best way to insure that the data that resided on these drives is unreadable? Have recreate the filesystems, but not sure if this is good enough. Have any suggestions or programs used to clean HPUX harddrives?

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

The only way to absolutely ensure that the data is unrecoverable is to physically destroy the disks. Hammers and/or magnets work well. If just making it difficult to read will suffice, the try dd:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/cXtXdX bs=1024k

Do not use mediainit!


Pete

[RAC_1]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/cxtxdx bs=1024k
There are some gnu utlities to do this.

Anil

[Steven E. Protter]

An OS install including the disks will absolutely guarantee eraseure.

Otherwise the above dd commands are the way to go.

SEP

[Rick Garland]

There was a post with numerous responses just last week that covers this question.

[Geoff Wild]

Here's a recent post on same topic:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=860835

Rgds...Geoff

[Leslie Fischer]

Thank you all for your replies.
This did the trick.