Force ingite to autoperform mediainit ?

[Brian Kinney]

I have existing images which I'd like to modify so they'll mediainit -f all drives on a server PRIOR to the installation.

Any ideas?

[Sanjay_6]

Hi,

It is not advisable to run mediainit on the disk being supplied now-a-days. It was okay in old days, but the new disks, don't need mediainit.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Arockia Jegan]

mediainit will take long time to format the drives. I had a bad experience on that.

[Bill Hassell]

As mentioned, mediainit can take a long time, way more than an hour for 2Gb disks. For modern disks (like 18Gb or 36Gb), you won't be able to do anything until the next day. mediainit actually does not perform the formatting: it simply asks the drive to format itself and then waits. Years ago, when 2Gb disks were new, mediainit had to be patched because it only waited for two hours and would timeout, reset the disk and leave the disk only partially formatted.

[Brian Kinney]

Well, that puts a kink in my plans! My security group expects the disks to be wiped before reusing a system. I contacted software support about wiping disks, and all THREE pages of suggestions from them call mediainit to format the drives!!!!

dd will run EVEN SLOWER than mediainit, so I have no idea where to go from here.

[Ian Dennison_1]

If the Security Guys are still keen for this philosophy, and the disks are hot-pluggable, why not create a spares pool of 2-3 drives of each capacity which have been wiped?

Instead of waiting for a format or mediainit, swap the 'polluted' drive out for a clean one, then you can mediainit the old one in slowtime on another server.

I used to have a similar problem in that disks could not go offsite for repair due to sensitive information. So we had a pool of spares, and simply demolished the old disks and brought a new spare.

Share and Enjoy! Ian

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Brian:

One quicker wipe might be to write zeros to the device (although this all seems to be overkill since the drives are remaining in your environment).

# dd if=/dev/zero of=dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=64k

If you are running 11.11 you should already have /dev/zero. If not, do this to create it:

# mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000003 #...on 10.20
# mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000004 #...on 11.x

# chown bin:bin /dev/zero
# chmod 666 /dev/zero

Regards!

...JRF...

[Christopher McCray_1]

Hello,

Due to the apparent problems you are facing, this might be something for your security staff to look into. It's called UniShred Pro and I had used it in the past on HP-UX:

http://www.lat.com/usp_main.htm

Hope this helps

Chris

[Brian Kinney]

My primary goal is to wipe the disks BEFORE any OS install/reinstall or donating the hardware to a school. All partitions, including root must be wiped. On Solaris, I can boot from the network in single user mode, and run standard formatting functions on ALL disks. We have a way for the jumpstart to do this for us.

For fastest turnaround, I'd like this process to be done via IGNITE.

I have one of every HP imaginable (serious hardware history here....) and EVERY disk will go through this process or get put under the hydraulic press or through a degausser. I can dd if I have to, especially if mediainit is known to crap out after two hours. Time is not a major issue, reliable data wiping is.

[Christopher McCray_1]

Hello again,

I am not aware of your environment (government, etc), but the product I mentioned above is good enough for the U.S. Military for classified systems, so myguess is it will be good enough for your needs (excluding dollar constraints)

Good luck

Chris

[Wayne Yu_1]

If you disk are individual disk, you can do mediainit on them before running the ignite creation/restore process.

First, you will need to find the hardware path of the disk, which is different from different models. Say /dev/dsk/c0t6d0

Then putting your HP-UX boot cdrom and boot from that. At the prompt, do
./mediainit /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0
....

You may then proceed boot off the ignite tape...

It will take a long time, but at certain situation, that is the only way to get them initialized...

Good luck!

[Julio Cesar Perez_3]

Hi Brian,

I'm a hardware technician at a refurbish shop. I just wanted to let you know that you can boot up from ignite select the recovery option, select X to get a shell, loadfile mediainit, and format each individual drive using the "&" that the end (this will put the job in the back ground so that you may format as many drives as you need to). It REALLY doesn't take more than an hour to an hour and a half (newer drives will take half and hour to forty-five minutes {LVM, and most 18Gb-73Gb dirves}). I understand about the security thing. We have to format every disk that we get because they are used drives with old customer data. After that reboot the machine and ignite it. Hope this helps you out.

Julio C??sar