Erasing Servers

[spherrod]

Hi,

I'll confess I've no idea if this can be done easily or not but I work for an IT department who have recently upgraded to VMWare IBM servers. Our old Compaq Proliant 1500 servers (and others) are now redundant and we wish to dispose of them.

However, we need to be sure they are securely wiped before we can sell them on - we have spoken to professional companies who will erase the contents and provide certification to this effect but this negates any profit we can make on the old equipment.

Does anyone know any methods (as automated as possible as there's a lot of equipment) to erase Servers and attached SCSI RAID Arrays?

Any questions - just ask

Cheers!

 

[addragyn]

You could integrated the drivers you need into DBAN. I'm sure there are products out there that will do this OOTB.

What are the new servers?

 

[jose]

Why don't you just format the arrays, or better yet pull all the drives and low level format them individually on a host bus adapter. ie 29160n adapter.
After that nothing can be retieved.

Regards,
Jose

 

[spherrod]

Wow - great response guys! I've looked at DBAN but wouldn't know how to integrate the drivers, I had a quick Google and couldn't find any free software which will do the task.

We could just format the arrays, but we don't have a host adaptor we could use so they'd have to be formatted in place. Would the servers have originally come with some form of utlility for fomatting, etc? The previous administrators have left no disks or manuals regarding theser servers but they might be available for download somewhere?

The new servers are IBM and run VMWare which then emulates whatever servers we have running - mostly Win2K

 

[jose]

Do you have any raid controller in the server ? If so then, you can format the array w/in the controller's bios.

Regards,
Jose

 

[spherrod]

Originally posted by: jose
Do you have any raid controller in the server ? If so then, you can format the array w/in the controller's bios.

Regards,
Jose

I'll check that!

 

[addragyn]

A format does not equal a wipe. If that's an important distinction.

Try DBAN. It will detect and wipe pretty much any setup out there. Otherwise why not offer the programmer a couple hundred to modify a version for you?

Otherwise run some type of cloning software. Make a script bootble ghost cd with a partition full of garbage. Have ghost blow that up to what ever size the drive is. Have another disk with different garbage. Run both.

 

[jose]

Those drives are prob. pretty old, get a lsi adapter for $100 that supports both se &amp; lvd or better yet get a used adapted 2940u2w off ebay and format the drives. cost < $100

Regards,
Jose

 

[spherrod]

Sorry for the delay in responding guys! It looks like that using the controller BIOS and DBAN will do what we need, wipe everything!

 

[thorin]

Ya DBAN is great if you can go that route. I know lots of people who depend on DBAN for their data destruction needs.

Thorin