Looking for tool to wipe disks

[Paul Heffels_1]

Hi all,

We'll be retiring some machines soon and according to security regulations we
need to wipe all disks in the systems. Does anybody know of a good way or tool
to wipe disks that will make it impossible under all circumstances to recover
the disks?

Thanks in advance.

[Carlos Riera]

Hi:

To make this job i use to create a striped lvol using all disk, and run newfs.
But this only break existent structures.

On others OS there are a /dev/zero, like /dev/null but for input. Instead you
can use /usr/bin/yes and pipe to a dd.

It is just an idea.

Regards.

[Robert Gamble_3]

Paul,

I have two suggestions.

First, do a man page on mediainit. It will destroy anything on any media and is
provided free with HP-UX.

Second, see the following link. It is a program that prevents sensitive,
confidential, proprietary or classified date from being recovered from SCSI
disks.

Good Luck!

[Steve White_8]

You can do one of a couple of things, use mediainit /dev/dsk/cxtxd0 or dd
if=/dev/null of=/dev/dsk/cxtxdx. When you use these commands ensure you know
the device addresses or you will destroy data. There is still equipment out
there that is capable of restoring data that was on these drives when you use
the above methods.

In a high security environment the only acceptable means of wiping the disk is
destroying it. The normal guidelines mean that you would have those drives
melted.