HPUX Equivalent of Norton WipeDisk

[Ken Rahaim]

I need an HPUX utility or product that will let me permanently erase sensitive data for maximum security. Can anyone provide a suggestion or information on such a product? Thank you!
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KenR

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Ken:

The easiest method in UNIX is to write 0's to every byte on the drive. One method is this:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=8000k


If you don't have a /dev/zero make one like this:

mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000003
chmod 444 /dev/zero

It will supply an unlimited number of ASCII NUL's.

[Ian Dennison_1]

sledgehammer - quick, easy, convenient!

No points, please!

Share and Enjoy! Ian Dennison

[Ken Rahaim]

Clay,

Will this process of writing zero's across the whole drive render it useless? We eventually intend to use these drives in a less sensitive environment.
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KenR

[Robert_Jewell]

Wouldnt the mediainit command take care of that? Running mediainit -v /dev/rdsk/cxtxdx re-initializes the, uh, media, but does it render the data that was there unrecoverable? That I dont know.

-Bob

[harry d brown jr]

Ken,

No, it will still be usable. Just the data will be zeroes!


live free or die
harry

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi again:

No the drive will still be fully functional. You will need to do a new pvcreate or a fdisk\format if it is going to be used in one of those alien operating systems.

[Wodisch]

Hello Ken,

Ian's answer is the only reliable one, I am afraid to say!

Data Recovery companies are able to restore data overwritten on the disk platters even after up to 20 overwrites, AFAIK...

So go for the hammer-approach, or do the "dd" or "mediainit" quite often (and hence taking a long, long time).
Oh, a huge electro-magnet might be useful - like they use on the crans at the "waste-metal-dumps" (metal-junkyards? you know, where the put old cars to a "rest", and lift them with electro-magents on a cran...).

Just my $0.02,
Wodisch