[clug-talk] Alternatives to DBAN

[Gustin Johnson]

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Craig McLean wrote:
> Hello.
> 
> I have some HP Hardware and I need to securely erase the hard drives before
> I send the servers on to their next task.  I tried DBAN 2.0 but it doesn't
> support the raid controllers in the HP servers.  What other open source
> options are out there for securely erasing server drives?
> 
> The hardware is specifically a DL360 G4 with an embedded HP Smart Array 6i
> Raid Controller.  The disks are standard HP ULTRA 320 hot pluggable scsi
> disks.
> 
> I know I could disassemble the hot plug cages and put the disks into another
> machine I have with a standard ULTRA 320 scsi controller, but I'd prefer to
> avoid that.
> 
> Does anybody have any ideas?
> 
I have had a couple of machines where DBAN did not recognize the
controller.  What I usually do in those cases is to boot from a Ubuntu,
Knoppix, or systemrescuecd live media (CD/DVD/USB pendrive etc) and do
the following as root:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/<target> && dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/<target>

You could always use the shred util included in most of those previously
mentioned live distros, I usually use the "-n 3" flag which limits shred
to 3 passes.  Its default of 25 takes a really long time.
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