Chris, I'd go for dd as mediainit has been slow for me. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsk/cXXdXXtX This should to the trick for normal standard data sensitivity.
Popular options include re-installing the OS, running dd against it, running pvcreate -f, or mediainit. Any of the above will work, it just depends on how sensitive the data is on the disk and how cautious you need/want to be.
To my way of thinking, there shouldn't be any sensitive data on the root disk anyway.
I would think dd would work up until it overwrites the dd binary itself. After that, I'm not sure what would happen. Did you specify a blocksize:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 bs=1024k
It's true that pvcreate won't actually destroy any data on the disk but it makes it darn hard for anyone to recover unless they knew the layout of the disk to start with. Even destructive methods like dd and mediainit leave data behind that the determined snoop can get at.
Even doing a rm -rf / will render the OS inoperable...
Rgds...Geoff
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.
As msntioned, vg00 probably has only a few "significant" files on it that you don't want seen.
Consider removing or modifiy those. For example, you could eliminate all account information and $HOME directories; reduce the '/etc/hosts' file to a minimum; and remove network information from '/etc/rc.config.d/netconf', etc.
Short of physically destroying the disk, you would need to overwrite it 10-20 times to truly make it unreadable.
My preferred method for this is to use 'dd' to wipe the data disks on the system.
Then I do a BASE HP-UX install to one of the data disks, without doing any additoinal software, customizations, etc., and then use dd from that install to wipe the original OS disks.
