sanitising a sun solaris hard disk

[rn4it]

Hi
I have some Sun Solaris 8 or 9 boxes. Which are being retired and I need to sanitize the data. With other systems we're doing an over write of zeros to clear the data. Then format the disk and reinstall the OS. How would I do this on a sun solaris 8 and 9 servers?

thanks
John

 

[Annihilannic]

I would simply dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/cXtxdXs2 bs=1048576 for each disk on the system as you have done for other systems. Naturally you would need to do that while booted off CD or some other device if you want to do the boot disk as well.

If you want to be really really secure you could use /dev/random as a source (could be slower and CPU intensive) or some random file over and over again, because the theory is that if you write zeroes it's still possible to see the "ghost" of the original data on the disk, but in reality that is highly impractical to do.

Annihilannic.

 

[iambosley]

The only safe way is complete destruction of the hard drives using sledge hammer or other preferred method ..

Roger Bosley

 

[cndcadams]

Agree with Annihilannic. Just run each drive through the DD about 10 times.

I had done some research about 7 years ago on this and you could run format READ and WRITE and do that about 29 times. Can't find where I read that. I actually just cleaned out my hard copies of these procedure about a month ago or I would have had all kinds of things for you.

Also I had found way back when.

http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0600/scrub.pdf

Personally if you are not going to use the drives again there are certified destruction companies. We use one that comes in, scans all serial#'s, gives you a list, puts a lock on the crate. Then ship it to their facility. You can actually watch them cut the lock, and put the drives into the shredder. They will even ship you a CD of the destruction after wards. You need to way your time spent wiping the drives against cost of destruction.