Summary: wiping disks

From: Steven Timm (timm@fnal.gov)
Date: Thu Jun 01 2006 - 16:32:03 EDT


Many replies came, too fast to name everyone, but thanks for
all who responded.

a) to clear the boot disks, should boot off of the install CD.

b) using /dev/zero as input may not be good enough for all
applications. But for mine it is.

c) Can use a bigger block size, people suggested between 65536 and 512k,
to make it go a lot faster.

d) there's a program called zeero that does this.

e) Many suggested hooking up to PC with SCSI controller and using
Ghost or similar, or else some open-source utility that would
run under linux or DOS to wipe the disks. We often do that
at Fermilab but given the legacy structure of the cables on
this array it would be more trouble than it was worth to hook up the PC.

f) It was pointed out that HSZ and HSG disk arrays have got a function
to do this at controller level. Suffice it to say that this
particular disk array is much older and cheaper than that class of
equipment.

Steve Timm

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
Steven C. Timm, Ph.D  (630) 840-8525  timm@fnal.gov  http://home.fnal.gov/~timm/
Fermilab Computing Div/Core Support Services Dept./Scientific Computing Section
Assistant Group Leader, Farms and Clustered Systems Group
Lead of Computing Farms Team


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