Disk wiping station Documentation

Location

The disk wiping station is located in the support desk on level 4 of the Appleton tower. Look for the signage. it is currently a standard DICE desktop although this may change in the future.

Loading discs.

3.5" discs

• There is an external drive enclosure with slots for 4 3.5" drives. The enclosure is caddyless and the drives can be hot swapped.
• Remove your drive from it's dell/HP/whatever caddy, open the small gate, line up the disk in the slot and push the drive firmly to the back of the enclosure
• After a few seconds the corresponding LED on the top of the enclosure should light up and the drive will be available under linux.
• Note that the linux kernel will assign the next available drive space to the newly installed disc, depending on what other drives are installed in both enclosures this could be /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc.../dev/sdz. We would advise using lsblk to find out the drive allocations :
  

[shar]iainr: lsblk
NAME          MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda             8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk  
├─sda1          8:1    0  78.1G  0 part  /
├─sda2          8:2    0   4.5M  0 part  
├─sda3          8:3    0   7.7G  0 part  
│ └─swap_sda3 253:0    0   7.7G  0 crypt [SWAP]
├─sda4          8:4    0   7.8G  0 part  /var/cache/afs
├─sda5          8:5    0   9.8G  0 part  
│ └─tmp_sda5  253:1    0   9.8G  0 crypt /tmp
└─sda6          8:6    0 362.4G  0 part  /disk/scratch
sr0            11:0    1  1024M  0 rom   

before and after installing disks to verify which ones you will be deleting

It should not be sda. please don't wipe /dev/sda because you'll be wiping the OS.

2.5" discs

Unfortunately there were no caddyless 2.5" SAS/SATA enclosures available, screws are available and more screws and a set of screwdrivers are on order.

• Remove the drive from it's dell/HP/whatever caddy, mount it in the enclosure caddy using the flush mounted screws provided.
• Insert the caddy and an LED on the front of the enclosure should light up and the drive will be available under linux.
• Note that the linux kernel will assign the next available drive space to the newly installed disc, depending on what other drives are installed in both enclosures this could be /dev/sdb, /dev/sdc.../dev/sdz. It should not be sda. please don't wipe /dev/sda because you'll be wiping the OS.

Wiping discs

Unless there are specific requirements to wipe a disc using named software it is probably sufficient to overwrite the whole disk with zeros. Identifying the correct disk is probably best done via running the the lsblk command before and after installing a disc.

then wipe the disc by using something like

 dd if=/dev/zero bs=4096 of=/dev/sd{device} 

-- IainRae - 26 Sep 2018