Wipe disk drives.

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

I am going to be retiring my D380 server within the next couple of weeks and wanted to know if there was any procedure to wipe the hard drives. At this point I don’t think that there is any useful information on the hard drives but I want to ensure that there isn’t anything on them before they leave our office.

Thanks for the help.

[Dave La Mar]

Jeff -
We just went through that with an XP512 and dd was the preference. You will find many posts supplementing this and other ways.
It just seemed to be the best fit for us though it was time consuming due to the number of disks involved.
For you, it would be a small task.

Best of luck.

Regards,

-dl

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Jeffrey:

One solution is to write zeros or some random pattern at least once over the disk. This is a "reasonable" destruction for most.

# dd if=/dev/zeros of=/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=1024k

or:

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=dev/rdsk/CxtYdZ bs=1024k

Note the use of the raw disk device to circumvent the LVM layer. Note, too, the use of a large blocksize for fast I/O.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

I tried to do the dd command to clear my drives but it didnt seem to work. What am I doing wrong? Here is what happened.

root: / ==> dd if=/dev/zeros of=/dev/rdsk/c6t3d0 bs=1024k
/dev/zeros: No such file or directory
dd: cannot open /dev/zeros
root: / ==> dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/rdsk/c6t3d0 bs=1024k
/dev/urandom: No such file or directory
dd: cannot open /dev/urandom

Do I need to create a file called "zeros" and "urandom"?

Thanks.

[Kent Ostby]

you have to configure in the "rng" driver to the kernel and create device files that look like this:

cr--r--r-- 1 bin bin 62 0x000000 May 10 18:09 /dev/random
cr--r--r-- 1 bin bin 62 0x000001 May 10 18:09 /dev/urandom

[Kent Ostby]

To get /dev/zero, you would create the device file:

mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000004

I believe it's /dev/zero not /dev/zeros.

[baiju_3]

As Kent told it is /dev/zero .

thx,
bl.

[Jeffrey F. Goldsmith]

I found the /dev/zero and started with the last hard drive. Do you know how long it takes to perform this operation? I have 21 external hard drives and they are only 4GB each.

Thanks

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Jeffrey:

Sorry, Kent is correct, the device file is '/dev/zero' without the "s" I inadvertantly added.

You don't say what release you are running.

To see hwat minor devices you have, do:

# lssf /dev/* 2> /dev/null|grep "mm"

If you are running 10.20, you will need to do:

# mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000003

On 11.0, use:

# mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000004

You should have /dev/zero on 11.11 and later.

Regards!

...JRF...

[baiju_3]

No need of filling your entire disk with zeros.

Do a pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/c?t?d? ,

Do this using a shell script , this will be much faster than writing zeros .


Thanks,
Bl.

[Artyom Voronchihin]

Hello!

You can also use mediainit command (man mediainit(1) for further info).
Example:
# mediainit /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0

[baiju_3 · Accepted solution]

One suggestion ,

mediainit is low level format , not recommened.

thx,
bl.

[Victor Fridyev]

Hi,

In addition to the proposed ideas you can just copy a system disk onto the "data" drives.
dd if=/dev/rdsk/cXXXX of=/dev/rdsk/cYYYY bs=32768k

HTH

[Sheriff Andy]

If you truly want to wipe the disks then you need to use dd & not pvcreate.

Look up KB doc ID KBRC00010654. This might be of some assistance as it was for us.

[Florian Heigl (new acc)]

I think dd will suffice for what You want, it will overwrite the whole disks with zeroes and a regular computer user (like You, me, and 90% of us)won't be able to recover anything from it.

Otherwise see the attachment to my post in this older thread:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=957297

[the9volt]

great information.. this is from 2005.. can we get some updated insctructions for those of us who are not using Linux too.

[Torsten.]

Open your own thread please.

[the9volt]

A new thread was unnecessary.  You can wipe drives from opening the same menu from bootup. it's just really slow with the HP utility.  If you can get into an OS setting I recomend that, HP's wiping tool is slow AF

[the9volt]

Also HP's ILOM web interface on gen9 does not work.  You can't open a console via the web interface.  You have to download the ilom utility from here:

https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_4f842ceb31cf48d392e22705a8

Upon bootup select the F10/intelligent configuration option then choose smart storage administrator.  Browse through the storage administrator tool and there is an "erase drive" option where you can select how many passes to meet DOD standards.

it'd be nice if official forum personnel could give answers like that =P