wipe disk utility

[Grant Wenstrand]

Is anyone aware of a "wipe disk utility" for HP-UX in a classified environment?

Thanks,

Grant

[Rick Garland]

Can use mediainit MULTIPLE times

[Grant Wenstrand]

Thanks Rick. I looked at the manpages for mediainit, but I am still unclear. What if I want to wipe the root partition as well? It should be easy to do it once, but how do I do it multiple times?

Thanks,

Grant

[Alan Riggs · Accepted solution]

mediainit cannot be used to wipe an active root partition. You can. however, boot to a recovery shell from the support CD and wipe the root disk from there.

[Rick Garland]

Alan has it. Can use mediainit to wipe a disk clean with exception of root disk/partition. Do it multiple times as once does not ensure that the data a clean/unrecoverable wipe.

[Tim Malnati]

Be careful here. If you are talking about government/military classification, there are all sorts of documented requirements which come into play. Depending on the level of classification, absolute destruction of the drives may be required (and even that's spelled out). Although mediainit will do the job, you may be in a situation where a certified product may be required.

[Grant Wenstrand]

You are absolutely right Tim. In this particular case destruction of the hard drives isn't necessary, but you raise an interesting point.

Does anyone know if mediainit is certified for military/government? Do additional solutions exist? My searches on the net have only yielded results for Intel-based solutions.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,

Grant

[Michael Lampi]

Mediainit is not adequate in most cases to remove all classified data from a disk drive. The problem is that it is possible for a disk block containing classified data to be placed in the "bad block" list automatically by the disk drive in the course of it recovering from an I/O error. Someone could at a later time potentially recover data from this block.

There are some tools available in the PC world that can be used to overwrite the user data blocks with a pattern and overwrite the bad blocks with a pattern. Unfortunately, I am not aware of such tools for HP-UX at this time.

[Grant Wenstrand]

I was afraid of this.

Thank you all for your input.

Cheers,

Grant

[Tim Malnati]

You could always bring the drive down to your local auto junk yard and place it under their lifting magnet. Don't laugh, I know someone who did this a while back to take care of a pickup truck full of old 9 track tapes. He just layed them out by the boxful. Don't wear your watch though.

[Robert R. Colp]

Grant-

A software package IS available for HP-UX 9.x and 10.x from Los Altos Technologies. The Software is called UniShred Pro. You can get more info at www.lat.com. It does do a DOD erase. No, I do not work for them, I researched this for the DOD computers I use!

[Grant Wenstrand]

Robert,

Thanks for the information. This product looks as if it will work for us.

Thanks,

Grant