Sun Hard Drive Wipes

UNIX Solaris
1

Greetings!!

I've been tasked with decommissioning a group of older Sun servers. I have several SunFire 280r among them as well as some others. I have asolutely no experience with Sun systems and find myself in a bit of a pickle. I need two things

  1. ... someone to explain to me in grade school level terms how to get one of these bohemoths to boot from a CD.
  2. ... some input/feedback on best practices to get DoD level hard drive wipes for these bad boys.

I thank you for you consideration.

---------- Post updated at 04:09 PM ---------- Previous update was at 03:31 PM ----------

Okay, so after alot of digging (started several hours before posting here) I have finally found some of my own answer...

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/817-1985/ggkuh/index.html

The question I have now is when am I supposed to see the OK prompt? It appears to have the HDD set for autoboot. The [break] key just gives me a ^[[208z

Any ideas or help please?

2

On SPARC servers:

  • power on[]wait for POST[]press STOP+A[*]at {0} ok prompt type boot cdrom

On x86 servers:

  • go to BIOS and select CD-ROM as first boot device[*]reboot
  • Boot Solaris 10 instalation CD/DVD[]select option 6. Single user shell[]run format []select disk you want to wipe[]type analyze []type purge [*]wait[]repeat for remaining disks
1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply!

  1. Not entirely sure what the [stop] key is as I am using a standard USB keyboard.
  2. Will the wipe procedure work with Solaris 9? I do not have 10 available.
4
  1. If you don't have SUN keyboard then you have to connect to serial console and send "break" or connect to RSC and send break from there.
  2. Solaris 9 CD should work too (I'm just not sure if the menu option is the same as in Solaris 10 CD, in any case you should choose something that will give you single user shell).
1 Like
5

If you can boot a system and get to the root prompt, you could do

eeprom auto-boot?=false
6

It's been a long time but I have a Sun USB keyboard for one of my SPARCs and if I remember correctly I could get to ok> by pressing the Break key or ctrl+break. without having to connect to serial.

you could always put the drives into an intel box and boot from a dban cd. after that drill holes and or shoot bullets into them :slight_smile: