HI,
I woluld like to know is it possible to boot solairs into single usermode from cd and using format -> purge command to wipe all the disk?
please suggest or any other method ?
my requirement is to completely wipe solaris box.
- what kind of disks and connections - SAN, local, or what?
- Hardware - Solaris box type v440, m4000, or what?
Please give us specifics. It may be possible to do this easily.
You cannot format the system disk and be logged directly into the system disk. You have to have booted from other media or use an interface like XSCF, for example.
Well, he mentions booting from CD. Yes, you can boot from and installation disk in general. I share Jim's fustration at the lack of any hardware info. With a sparc system you just do "boot cdrom -s" from the OK prompt. The system should boot into single user mode from the Installation disc. It will give you a root prompt. And yes you can run format.
However, under Solaris 10, I sure do not see any "purge" command in the format utility. There is a "format" command. It would probably do an adequate job on a SCSI disk.
I would probably do:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1048576 of=/dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2
I understand what dd is doing much more clearly than the format utility which I find to be a little opaque.
Here at work we have a very powerful demagnetizer which can wipe a disk in few seconds. We do that and throw the drive in a bin to await final destruction. Every few months a guy comes by with a "chipper". It is like the chippers used to turn tree branches into sawdust but it is intended for disk drives. It chops the disks up. Not quite to dust, but it turns them into chunks. It looks kinda like a breakfast cereal. He says he can recycle the chunks somehow. That must be a interesting trick.
Disks are not very expensive these days, but the data on them can be priceless. This is why we are required to use physical destruction. You might want to consider that.
You can boot into single user from CD:
boot cdrom -s
From the root (#) prompt you can then run
format
to access each hard drive.
The analyse/purge option will write multiple patterns to every sector of the drive(s) (will take a long time to run) after which no data can be recovered even using the most sophisticated methods. The number of patterns written exceeds the specification of the UK MOD and US DoD standards.
Here's a page from the Oracle blog:
https://blogs.oracle.com/cmt/entry/erasing\_disks_securely
As already said by other members, disks are cheap now but the above will avoid the necessity to put a hammer through them.
Hope that helps.
I think you should be able to verify the disk surface from within format and there is an option to do a destructive test. There was certainly one to do a non-destructive test when I used to have a Solaris server.
Is that an option? An alternate would be to slice the disk differently and then install a default Solaris and create filesystems from the other slices. That would probably clobber most data pointers.
Of course if you are super paranoid or have a regulatory or contractual obligation then you can remove and destroy the disks with a degausser (not sure on cost) or with one of the recycle companies that turn it all into high mineral compost.
What level of certainty do you need that no-one can read your data? A drill through the casing is a pretty good deterrent over data recovery.
Robin