Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

I am looking for a utility (vendor or shareware) to positively clean all data off retired disk drives on AIX 4 and 5 systems. Please let me know if you have used any tools of this type. Thanks, shawn.duffy@phns.com
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Have you tried the disk cleanup tool, under diag?
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Take a look at /usr/sbin/skulker. There should be a commented out entry in root's crontab to run this thing. It cleans up /tmp and /var.

HTH

Jim Lane
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Originally posted by: nagger

I think you mean disk scrubbing to completely remove data from a disk before it is junked or sold.

The USA DOD has strick guidlines on this, which involves two techniques.
1) For non-senitive data they repeatedly over write the entire disk with many bit patterns for hours.
2) Otherwise, they hit the disk with a hammer until he plater is bent and then crush it.

For a quick and dirty technique try:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rhdisk9 bs=1m

• assuming here it is hdisk9. This will write zeros over the entire disk and you will lose all data on the disk. So make sure you don't have any LVs or filesystems on the disk before you start. bs=1m i.e. 1 MB disk I/O, just makes it do large I/O for speed. Removing the disk from its current volume group and forcing it back in to a new volume group of its own, would be a good safety measure before you start.

I guess a simple program could be written to randomly spray bit patterns on the disk for a few hours. The idea is that if you just write zeros on the disk extremely advanced techniques could be applied to read the previous bit pattern by reading the disk surface around the zero for each bit - this would involve rebuilding the disk pattern with higher resolution read heads and many days work - not many people have the equipment, skills or time to attempt this but it is technically possible.
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Originally posted by: BruceSpencer

Lawrence Livermore Labs has a free disk scrubbing tool that appears to comply with the DOD standards

http://www.llnl.gov/linux/scrub/scrub.html

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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

With areal densities already past the point where an electron microscope could be used to guess at what the bits were written as previously, the need to 'scrub' hard drives to erase the data is pretty much an urban myth nowadays. The DoD pulled that number out of their collective posterior just to cover their posteriors in case a technology ever comes a long that would be able to guess at the disc's history after that many rewrites.

All you have to do is write zeros to the entire disk with dd or some similar utility once, and you're done -- the data has been sufficiently destroyed.

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Originally posted by: fengdao

You can use this AIX tool to erase the data:

diag -c -d <device name> -T "format -s erase -a write"

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