how to wipe off hard drive in solaris?

frankie_DJ · 06-14-2006, 04:15 PM

Hi everyone,

Long time no read. I've tried to reinstall solaris 10 from scratch but it seems like solaris instaler is leaving the old installation on the hard drive. It's only a 9GB HD so it is a problem.
I would like to reformat the hard drive, so I use 1st installation disk, get out of instaler and:

fdisk /dev/dsk/c0t0d0

but I get the message about disk not being raw or something like that. I thought of using

dd bs=1000k if=/dev/zero of=dev/dsk/c0t0d0

to wipe it of, but it keeps stopping without finishing entire disk for some reason. Plus this would leave partition info on, which I don't want. Any suggestions? Thanks

jlliagre · 06-15-2006, 01:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frankie_DJ

but it seems like solaris instaler is leaving the old installation on the hard drive.

Only if you do not ask it to do it otherwise.

Quote:

so I use 1st installation disk, get out of instaler and:

fdisk /dev/dsk/c0t0d0

but I get the message about disk not being raw or something like that.

You should use this command instead:

Code:

fdisk /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0p0

Quote:

I thought of using

dd bs=1000k if=/dev/zero of=dev/dsk/c0t0d0

to wipe it of, but it keeps stopping without finishing entire disk for some reason.

There is no such device, you are probably creating a big file in the /dev partition until the partition is full.
The correct command would have been:

Code:

dd bs=1000k if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsk/c0t0d0p0

frankie_DJ · 06-15-2006, 02:24 AM

Hi Jilliagre,

How are you? Still spreading the solaris wisdom?

As usual you are right. Installation does ask whether I want to preserve the data. The problem is, I have a small HD (9Gigs) and I didn't realize that full Solaris 10 installation (together with the open source CD) takes over 10GB! That's a lot. I thought that the problem was in the old install not getting wiped out.

Anyways...since you are available, one more question. I added another HD (~30GB) and put it as a slave. I don't think that was very smart. My partitioning layout is: 9gig HD is master and has /swap and /export/home and Entire slave is root directory. Was that stupid? I am thinking, access to slave is not as fast as access to master. The installation is still going on, so I don't know at this point if the access to / will be slower or not. What do you think?

jlliagre · 06-15-2006, 02:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by frankie_DJ

Hi Jilliagre,

How are you?

Just fine, thanks

Quote:

Still spreading the solaris wisdom?

The best I can ...

Quote:

As usual you are right. Installation does ask whether I want to preserve the data. The problem is, I have a small HD (9Gigs) and I didn't realize that full Solaris 10 installation (together with the open source CD) takes over 10GB! That's a lot.

That's right, not to mention that when you add all the blastwave stuff you'll need a bunch of gigabytes more, and each non sparse zones will multiply that need further.

200+GB disks are quickly filled nowadays.

Quote:

I thought that the problem was in the old install not getting wiped out.

Anyways...since you are available, one more question. I added another HD (~30GB) and put it as a slave. I don't think that was very smart. My partitioning layout is: 9gig HD is master and has /swap and /export/home and Entire slave is root directory. Was that stupid?I am thinking, access to slave is not as fast as access to master. The installation is still going on, so I don't know at this point if the access to / will be slower or not. What do you think?

I can't tell. At the end of the installation, you may want to measure the throughput of both of your disks to see if the "slave" one is significantly slower.
You will then be able to relocate slash to the faster disk should that make a difference.