Cleaning up before a new installation

[Brian Atkins]

OK, so some of you might think that this is a little weird, but here goes:

I have a 700 series Apollo that was just given to our project as a "toy", so to speak. Since it came from another project that is now defunct, I want to remove all the old information and start fresh. I would prefer to wipe everything clean and install a fresh OS.

The question is, what is the recommended method of wiping the old information off, then removing the OS. Is there some sort low level format that I can use?

[Mark Vollmers]

Brian-

There have been a number of threads about how to formating the drive to remove info. If I remember those, you can use the dd command, writing /dev/null to the drive location (I think). I can't seem to find them right now, but I'll keep looking for the exact syntax. Sorry I can't be more precise.

Mark

[Mark Vollmers · Accepted solution]

Brian-

Take a look at this thread for wiping a disk clean.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,11866,0x0c96abe92dabd5118ff10090279cd0f9,00.html

When you do a new install (not an update), it will overwrite all the system files, so you could also just do a rm of all the non-system files and then install the OS. Remember to keep any files that you might need (if you need /etc/passwd, /etc/groups, and so on), as the OS will overwrite them if you go this route.

Mark

[Sachin Patel]

Hi Brian,
New OS installation will remove old information. I will say just start installation without worring about information on disk.

Sachin

[Deshpande Prashant]

Hi
Fresh install will wipe out all old information on file sysetms for you.

Thanks.
Prashant