Wiping out a system

[Kerry Fay]

I have a rental HP system (version 11.00) that
we are decommissioning this Friday. Since this
machine will most likely be used by someone
else in the future, I need to know the fastest,
easiest way to destroy the data on the system
so that it cannot be recovered. I only have
an hour to do this, so I need something faster
than the obvious rm -rf from root or something.
Any ideas?

[Kevin Wright]

I think pvcreate -f will do it pretty quickly, depending on how many disks you have.

[Bruce Regittko_1]

Hi,

It depends on how trashed you want the data. If there are ultra sensitive data on the system then someone could possibly recover them despite rm, pvcreate, etc. The mediainit or dd commands will do the trick but probably not in an hour. Then again, a few minutes of either one will be just as good as rm or pvcreate for making the disks inaccessable from traditional Unix commands.

--Bruce

[Kerry Fay]

I know that the pvcreate will write a new
volume header / volume info on the disk but
it is not data destructive right?
Is there a file that can be written over these
disks using dd. For instance, on other UNIX
platforms there's a /dev/zero file that fills
up the space with as many zeros as specified.

[Philip Chan_1]

What about this.

Let say your file system to be wiped out is /xyz,

do

find /xyz -exec cp /dev/null {} \;

that should zero out every file under the /xyz fs.

you can try running newfs on the file system too, but this one I'm not sure if the file system undernearth will be completely reformated or not, may be other unix-guru here can answer.

Rgds,
Philip

[Jerry U]

i would pvcreate -f the disks (by booting off cd if you need to). then newfs them vxfs and then re-newfs them with hfs. I'm sure this would trash them enough.

[Thierry Poels_1]

Hi,
I have following note, but I'm wondering how effective it is on system disks :


1. Determine if the /dev/zero pseudo driver is available:

# lssf /dev/zero
pseudo driver mm minor 0x000003 /dev/zero

Note: If /dev/zero is not available, then execute the following command to create the driver:

# mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x00003

2. Overwrite all of the data on disk with zeros:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/....

Note: Replace "...." (in the above dd command) with the device file of the disk.

good luck,
Thierry.

[Thierry Poels_1 · Accepted solution]

just noted the request for a FAST solution :)

submit all the dd commands for every disk in background simultaneously. This will cause a very high load on your system, but who cares ;) Even if you have to shutdown the system before all dd's are fully completed, I think it would be pretty hard to recover anything from those disks.

Thierry.

[Kerry Fay]

Thank you all for your time. All these answers
were useful and possible solutions.