I am about to retire several servers and need to delete the company confidential data from the internal disks under LVM control. Is there a proven and easy way to accomplish this ?
Thanks for all the help in advance.
Use 'diag' to format the drives.
# diag - Task Selection - Format Media
HTH
First off, thank you for your answer. Secondly, how secure is the data deletion using the format utility of diag ? Is it writing certain patterns on the existing disk blocks to obliterate them or just erasing the data from the leading inode of each file to make them inaccessible ?
Also, since I need to run this from an aix command prompt, what do you suggest doing the same for the disks in rootvg. Unfortunately, rootvg contained some business related data, despite my initial resistance to it. Now, I have rub rootvg volumes clean before turning these servers back to the leasing hosue.
If I remember correctly the Format Media menu gives you a couple of options for which pattern you want to use to format the disk.
As far as formating rootvg - I imagine you could put the drive(s) in another running AIX system and then format them the same way as the other vg drives.
You could connect the disks to another system and then use "dd" to directly write to the disks device. This would not be 100% percent sure but close enough to that for all practical purposes. As long as nobody disassembles the disks and uses CIA methods and tools to recover the data it will be a save method.
If you want to be really, really 100% sure: take the disks and tear them to pieces, punching large holes into the magnetic surface.
I hope this helps.
bakunin