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Spin up HDD in PUIS mode and wipe drive for new placement

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  • Recently I came across an older DVR unit, taking into consideration I’m not one to pass up an opportunity to harvest tech, so I took the liberties I had been granted.

    Just want the commands and take your chances? Skip down beyond my rambling.

    Not much useful inside most of these units, but there was a mechanical HDD.

    The drive is a WD5000AVVS, after a bit of googling around, I found Western Digital made these specifically for a DVR application. In other words, not really made to support a desktop environment. No reason to let that stop me from adding it for basic storage.


    The drive was utilizing PUIS or Power [Up In Standby] , something WD came up with themselves, from the wiki:

    Power-up in standby (PUIS) or power management 2 mode (PM2; Western Digital specific) is a SATA or Parallel ATA (aka PATA) hard disk configuration which prevents the drive from automatic spinup when power is applied. The spinup occurs later by an ATA command, only when the disk is needed, to conserve electric power[dubious – discuss] and to avoid a power consumption peak caused by a simultaneous spin-up of multiple disks.


    Useful tip: Since the drive will not power up on boot, I had to connect the drive to a raid controller to get it to spin up. I’m sure there are other means, such as issuing ATA commands.


    Set PUIS mode on Western Digital Hard Drive

    Enter the hdparm command , for help on commands just type in:

    hdparm
    
    hdparm - get/set hard disk parameters - version v9.43, by Mark Lord.
    
    Usage:  hdparm  [options] [device ...]
    
    Options:
     -a   Get/set fs readahead
     -A   Get/set the drive look-ahead flag (0/1)
     -b   Get/set bus state (0 == off, 1 == on, 2 == tristate)
     -B   Set Advanced Power Management setting (1-255)
     -c   Get/set IDE 32-bit IO setting
     -C   Check drive power mode status
     -d   Get/set using_dma flag
     -D   Enable/disable drive defect management
     -E   Set cd/dvd drive speed
     -f   Flush buffer cache for device on exit
     -F   Flush drive write cache
     -g   Display drive geometry
     -h   Display terse usage information
     -H   Read temperature from drive (Hitachi only)
     -i   Display drive identification
     -I   Detailed/current information directly from drive
     -J   Get/set Western DIgital "Idle3" timeout for a WDC "Green" drive (DANGEROUS)
     -k   Get/set keep_settings_over_reset flag (0/1)
     -K   Set drive keep_features_over_reset flag (0/1)
     -L   Set drive doorlock (0/1) (removable harddisks only)
     -m   Get/set multiple sector count
     -M   Get/set acoustic management (0-254, 128: quiet, 254: fast)
     -n   Get/set ignore-write-errors flag (0/1)
     -N   Get/set max visible number of sectors (HPA) (VERY DANGEROUS)
     -p   Set PIO mode on IDE interface chipset (0,1,2,3,4,...)
     -P   Set drive prefetch count
     -q   Change next setting quietly
     -Q   Get/set DMA queue_depth (if supported)
     -r   Get/set device readonly flag (DANGEROUS to set)
     -R   Get/set device write-read-verify flag
     -s   Set power-up in standby flag (0/1) (DANGEROUS)
     -S   Set standby (spindown) timeout
     -t   Perform device read timings
     -T   Perform cache read timings
     -u   Get/set unmaskirq flag (0/1)
     -U   Obsolete
     -v   Use defaults; same as -acdgkmur for IDE drives
     -V   Display program version and exit immediately
     -w   Perform device reset (DANGEROUS)
     -W   Get/set drive write-caching flag (0/1)
     -x   Obsolete
     -X   Set IDE xfer mode (DANGEROUS)
     -y   Put drive in standby mode
     -Y   Put drive to sleep
     -z   Re-read partition table
     -Z   Disable Seagate auto-powersaving mode
     --dco-freeze      Freeze/lock current device configuration until next power cycle
     --dco-identify    Read/dump device configuration identify data
     --dco-restore     Reset device configuration back to factory defaults
     --direct          Use O_DIRECT to bypass page cache for timings
     --drq-hsm-error   Crash system with a "stuck DRQ" error (VERY DANGEROUS)
     --fallocate       Create a file without writing data to disk
     --fibmap          Show device extents (and fragmentation) for a file
     --fwdownload            Download firmware file to drive (EXTREMELY DANGEROUS)
     --fwdownload-mode3      Download firmware using min-size segments (EXTREMELY DANGEROUS)
     --fwdownload-mode3-max  Download firmware using max-size segments (EXTREMELY DANGEROUS)
     --fwdownload-mode7      Download firmware using a single segment (EXTREMELY DANGEROUS)
     --idle-immediate  Idle drive immediately
     --idle-unload     Idle immediately and unload heads
     --Istdin          Read identify data from stdin as ASCII hex
     --Istdout         Write identify data to stdout as ASCII hex
     --make-bad-sector Deliberately corrupt a sector directly on the media (VERY DANGEROUS)
     --offset          use with -t, to begin timings at given offset (in GiB) from start of drive
     --prefer-ata12    Use 12-byte (instead of 16-byte) SAT commands when possible
     --read-sector     Read and dump (in hex) a sector directly from the media
     --security-help   Display help for ATA security commands
     --trim-sector-ranges        Tell SSD firmware to discard unneeded data sectors: lba:count ..
     --trim-sector-ranges-stdin  Same as above, but reads lba:count pairs from stdin
     --verbose         Display extra diagnostics from some commands
     --write-sector    Repair/overwrite a (possibly bad) sector directly on the media (VERY DANGEROUS)
    

    As we can see, there is a command we can utilize to change the PUIS setting of the drive:

    hdparm -s
    

    Of course you must enter the device name you wish to change the settings on. So we can use:

    lsblk
    

    The lsblk command will list all block devices in the system

    Which in this case spits out the following:

    NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
    sda      8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
    └─sda1   8:1    0 465.8G  0 part 
    sdb      8:16   0 465.8G  0 disk 
    └─sdb1   8:17   0 465.8G  0 part /media/rick/WD500GB
    sdc      8:32   0 465.8G  0 disk 
    └─sdc2   8:34   0     1K  0 part
    

    This is now that the drive is finished, formatted and partitioned in the system. Sometimes you’ll need a bit more data to make the choice as to which drive you’ll be schnookering.

    So we can use lsblk flags as well.

    lsblk --output MODE,NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,UUID
    

    Which spits out the following infos:

    MODE       NAME   FSTYPE          LABEL   UUID
    brw-rw---- sda    isw_raid_member         
    brw-rw---- └─sda1                         
    brw-rw---- sdb                            
    brw-rw---- └─sdb1 ext4            WD500GB 4e423629-51e8-41b3-a9be-9c9af4d31732
    brw-rw---- sdc    isw_raid_member         
    brw-rw---- └─sdc2 
    

    Well I know the two disks which say raid member are not it, and at this point there is only three block devices in the system, so I’ll use /dev/sdb

    If we look at the hdparm command to turn on or off PUIS, it states the two options which are 0/1 = Off or On

    So the command I’ll run on /dev/sdb to wake it up with hdparm is:

    hdparm -s 0 /dev/sdb
    

    Done with that jazz. The drive should spin up when powered on. Lest, we are not finished here. We should clean things up a bit.


    For simplicity I enjoy the shred command, plus it sounds serious, which it is.

    To find shred commands, we just run:

    shred --help
    

    Which pukes out this:

    Usage: shred [OPTION]... FILE...
    Overwrite the specified FILE(s) repeatedly, in order to make it harder
    for even very expensive hardware probing to recover the data.
    
    Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
      -f, --force    change permissions to allow writing if necessary
      -n, --iterations=N  overwrite N times instead of the default (3)
          --random-source=FILE  get random bytes from FILE
      -s, --size=N   shred this many bytes (suffixes like K, M, G accepted)
      -u, --remove[=HOW]  truncate and remove file after overwriting; See below
      -v, --verbose  show progress
      -x, --exact    do not round file sizes up to the next full block;
                       this is the default for non-regular files
      -z, --zero     add a final overwrite with zeros to hide shredding
          --help     display this help and exit
          --version  output version information and exit
    

    Remember, this can be done on any drive, so everything and anything will be lost to the abyss forever. Pay attention to which drive letter / name you are using.

    The default pass is 25 times, yea, I’ve never needed a 25 pass random write scrub and I hope never to. So we can use the flag -n to limit how many passes shred does.

    I enjoy seeing output, so I’ll use the -v or, Verbose / noisy output flag as well.

    I also had no idea what permissions were set, so I used the -f or Force flag As stated, this changes permissions to allow for the write procedure if required.

    If your obsessive about keeping things straight, use the -z flag also, this will add one more pass after ‘shredding’ and write zero’s across the drive. Instead of having the drive look as if someone intentionally randomly repeatedly wrote ‘junk’ to it. Just make your bed.

    The command I used to wipe the drive was as follows:

    shred -n 5 -v -f -z /dev/sdb 
    

    Let the shredding begin, here is the initial output:

    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...330MiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...687MiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...1.0GiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...1.3GiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...1.7GiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...2.1GiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...2.4GiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...2.8GiB/466GiB 0%
    shred: /dev/sdb: pass 1/6 (random)...3.1GiB/466GiB 0%
    

    And this goes on for quite some time. Notice we used the -n 5 flag, for five passes, yet we can see shred is currently on pass 1/6. Good, this means the last pass will be all zeros.

    Go do something else until your ready to format and partition the drive. Let it run!

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      lime-itL

      Again running smartctl after all is said and done:

      smartctl --all /dev/sda

      ddrescue-smartctl-after-rescue.png ddrescue-smartctl-2.png

      Yet an old drive in itself, I run the wheels off of them, and monitor regularly as anyone should.

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      rickR

      Here is the Freebsd manpage for the newfs command:

      NEWFS(8) FreeBSD System Manager's Manual NEWFS(8) NAME newfs -- construct a new UFS1/UFS2 file system SYNOPSIS newfs [-EJNUjlnt] [-L volname] [-O filesystem-type] [-S sector-size] [-T disktype] [-a maxcontig] [-b block-size] [-c blocks-per-cylinder-group] [-d max-extent-size] [-e maxbpg] [-f frag-size] [-g avgfilesize] [-h avgfpdir] [-i bytes] [-k held-for-metadata-blocks] [-m free-space] [-o optimization] [-p partition] [-r reserved] [-s size] special DESCRIPTION The newfs utility is used to initialize and clear file systems before first use. The newfs utility builds a file system on the specified spe- cial file. (We often refer to the ``special file'' as the ``disk'', although the special file need not be a physical disk. In fact, it need not even be special.) Typically the defaults are reasonable, however newfs has numerous options to allow the defaults to be selectively over- ridden. The following options define the general layout policies: -E Erase the content of the disk before making the filesystem. The reserved area in front of the superblock (for bootcode) will not be erased. This option is only relevant for flash based storage devices that use wear-leveling algorithms. Erasing may take a long time as it writes to every sector on the disk. -J Enable journaling on the new file system via gjournal. See gjournal(8) for details. -L volname Add a volume label to the new file system. -N Cause the file system parameters to be printed out without really creating the file system. -O filesystem-type Use 1 to specify that a UFS1 format file system be built; use 2 to specify that a UFS2 format file system be built. The default format is UFS2. -T disktype For backward compatibility. -U Enable soft updates on the new file system. -a maxcontig Specify the maximum number of contiguous blocks that will be laid out before forcing a rotational delay. The default value is 16. See tunefs(8) for more details on how to set this option. -b block-size The block size of the file system, in bytes. It must be a power of 2. The default size is 32768 bytes, and the smallest allow- able size is 4096 bytes. The optimal block:fragment ratio is 8:1. Other ratios are possible, but are not recommended, and may produce poor results. -c blocks-per-cylinder-group The number of blocks per cylinder group in a file system. The default is to compute the maximum allowed by the other parame- ters. This value is dependent on a number of other parameters, in particular the block size and the number of bytes per inode. -d max-extent-size The file system may choose to store large files using extents. This parameter specifies the largest extent size that may be used. The default value is the file system blocksize. It is presently limited to a maximum value of 16 times the file system blocksize and a minimum value of the file system blocksize. -e maxbpg Indicate the maximum number of blocks any single file can allo- cate out of a cylinder group before it is forced to begin allo- cating blocks from another cylinder group. The default is about one quarter of the total blocks in a cylinder group. See tunefs(8) for more details on how to set this option. -f frag-size The fragment size of the file system in bytes. It must be a power of two ranging in value between blocksize/8 and blocksize. The default is 4096 bytes. -g avgfilesize The expected average file size for the file system. -h avgfpdir The expected average number of files per directory on the file system. -i bytes Specify the density of inodes in the file system. The default is to create an inode for every (2 * frag-size) bytes of data space. If fewer inodes are desired, a larger number should be used; to create more inodes a smaller number should be given. One inode is required for each distinct file, so this value effectively specifies the average file size on the file system. -j Enable soft updates journaling on the new file system. This flag is implemented by running the tunefs(8) utility found in the user's $PATH. -k held-for-metadata-blocks Set the amount of space to be held for metadata blocks in each cylinder group. When set, the file system preference routines will try to save the specified amount of space immediately fol- lowing the inode blocks in each cylinder group for use by meta- data blocks. Clustering the metadata blocks speeds up random file access and decreases the running time of fsck(8). By default newfs sets it to half of the space reserved to minfree. -l Enable multilabel MAC on the new file system. -m free-space The percentage of space reserved from normal users; the minimum free space threshold. The default value used is defined by MINFREE from <ufs/ffs/fs.h>, currently 8%. See tunefs(8) for more details on how to set this option. -n Do not create a .snap directory on the new file system. The resulting file system will not support snapshot generation, so dump(8) in live mode and background fsck(8) will not function properly. The traditional fsck(8) and offline dump(8) will work on the file system. This option is intended primarily for memory or vnode-backed file systems that do not require dump(8) or fsck(8) support. -o optimization (space or time). The file system can either be instructed to try to minimize the time spent allocating blocks, or to try to mini- mize the space fragmentation on the disk. If the value of min- free (see above) is less than 8%, the default is to optimize for space; if the value of minfree is greater than or equal to 8%, the default is to optimize for time. See tunefs(8) for more details on how to set this option. -p partition The partition name (a..h) you want to use in case the underlying image is a file, so you do not have access to individual parti- tions through the filesystem. Can also be used with a device, e.g., newfs -p f /dev/da1s3 is equivalent to newfs /dev/da1s3f. -r reserved The size, in sectors, of reserved space at the end of the parti- tion specified in special. This space will not be occupied by the file system; it can be used by other consumers such as geom(4). Defaults to 0. -s size The size of the file system in sectors. This value defaults to the size of the raw partition specified in special less the reserved space at its end (see -r). A size of 0 can also be used to choose the default value. A valid size value cannot be larger than the default one, which means that the file system cannot extend into the reserved space. -t Turn on the TRIM enable flag. If enabled, and if the underlying device supports the BIO_DELETE command, the file system will send a delete request to the underlying device for each freed block. The trim enable flag is typically set when the underlying device uses flash-memory as the device can use the delete command to pre-zero or at least avoid copying blocks that have been deleted. The following options override the standard sizes for the disk geometry. Their default values are taken from the disk label. Changing these defaults is useful only when using newfs to build a file system whose raw image will eventually be used on a different type of disk than the one on which it is initially created (for example on a write-once disk). Note that changing any of these values from their defaults will make it impos- sible for fsck(8) to find the alternate superblocks if the standard superblock is lost. -S sector-size The size of a sector in bytes (almost never anything but 512). EXAMPLES newfs /dev/ada3s1a Creates a new ufs file system on ada3s1a. The newfs utility will use a block size of 32768 bytes, a fragment size of 4096 bytes and the largest possible number of blocks per cylinders group. These values tend to pro- duce better performance for most applications than the historical defaults (8192 byte block size and 1024 byte fragment size). This large fragment size may lead to much wasted space on file systems that contain many small files. SEE ALSO fdformat(1), geom(4), disktab(5), fs(5), camcontrol(8), dump(8), dumpfs(8), fsck(8), gpart(8), gjournal(8), growfs(8), gvinum(8), makefs(8), mount(8), tunefs(8) M. McKusick, W. Joy, S. Leffler, and R. Fabry, "A Fast File System for UNIX", ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 2, 3, pp 181-197, August 1984, (reprinted in the BSD System Manager's Manual).
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      rickR

      Find centOS version:

      cat /etc/centos-release

      RHEL:

      cat /etc/redhat-release
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  • For a more comprehensive or detailed guide, as to securely wiping a drive, visit nixCraft-how-do-i-permanently-erase-hard-disk

FreeBSD Notes
  • rickR

    Screen recording can use webm as their format, it can be more simple to use a gif to embed into a website or forum, than adding scripts to host different video format.

    In this case I grabbed a screen record of the progress for writing zeros to a hard drive with dd

    Use ffmpeg to convert webm to gif:

    First create a pallet:

    Move into the directory which the webm is located, or type in the path

    Where ‘dd.webm’ is the screen recording

    ffmpeg -y -i dd.webm -vf palettegen palette.png

    Output:

    dd-ffmpeg.png

    Then convert the webm to gif:

    ffmpeg -y -i dd.webm -i palette.png -filter_complex paletteuse -r 10 dd.gif

    dd-webm-2.png

    This is what I ended up with, looks like any image of any alien on the interwebz, as if shot through a potato, some tweaking of the command is in my future. None the less.

    dd.gif

    read more

  • rickR

    Write zeros to all sectors

    Use the command ‘lsblk’ to find the drive you wish to erase

    I’m using ‘dd’ to erase things

    In this case I’m torching sdb

    Only use status=progress if you care it’s not necessary

    dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdb bs=12M status=progress

    dd.gif

    read more

  • rickR

    Remove old kernel images that are cluttering the system

    zstd-no-space-error.png

    Most of these errors are due to low or not enough space left in the root partition.

    If you are using a Debian flavor:

    sudo apt-get autoremove --purge

    zstd-error.png

    Inform grub whenever an old kernel is removed:

    update grub

    update-grub.png

    Remove the un-used kernel config files:

    These will be the files pre cursed as ‘rc’ where installed kernels use ‘ii’

    … As well as files no longer used or required due to dependencies

    This command will detect, print, and remove left over cruft from previously installed packages or scripts, that have been removed or updated.

    sudo dpkg --purge $(dpkg -l | awk '/^rc/{print $2}')

    purge.png

    You can re-run the following to view the installed kernel(s):

    dpkg --list | grep linux-image

    installed-kernels.png

    read more

  • rickR

    To list all files in current directory including dot files (hidden files or directories), as well as print permissions :

    ls -la
    read more

  • rickR
    Install Ruby on Debian

    Install rbenv

    sudo apt install rbenv

    Then initialize the environment:

    rbenv init

    rbenv-init.png

    nano ~/.bashrc

    Type or paste the output above, Ctrl +x to save

    Apply:

    source .bashrc

    Install ruby-build

    Install git:

    sudo apt install git

    install-git.png

    mkdir -p "$(rbenv root)"/plugins

    Clone to local:

    git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git "$(rbenv root)"/plugins/ruby-build

    clone-ruby.png

    curl -fsSL https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv-installer/raw/main/bin/rbenv-doctor | bash

    ruby-doctor.png

    Now install Ruby:

    print ruby versions available

    rbenv install --list

    rb-list.png

    Install the latest version unless you have a reason otherwise:

    rbenv install 3.3.0

    On this system there was an error compiling at this point with fiddle, as well as psych: ruby-failed.png

    Therefore manually installing the following filled dependencies

    sudo apt install libtool sudo apt install libffi-dev

    rb-compile.png

    rbenv global 3.3.0

    print installed ruby version

    ruby -v

    ruby-version-installed.png

    read more