At 17:19 25.08.98 -0400, Nancy wrote:
> Other than deleting our application accounts, does anyone have
>suggestions about how we can insure that none of our data can be
>recovered from the drives of these machines once we ship them?

I'd probably purge all the application accounts (and related groups
inside the SYS account) and use a small command file loop to fill
the discs with copies of a large file like XL.PUB.SYS to overwrite
the (now) free space...

Something similar to

 setvar n,1
 while n < 1000000 do
   copy xl.pub.sys, my!n
   setvar n,n+1
 endwhile

This is probably a little easier than low-level formatting of the
drives or running extensive (destructive) read-write tests from
(password-protected) diagnostics. Specialized companies might still
be able to recover the overwritten data but with regular MPE tools
it should be fairly difficult then.

With User Volume Sets the above should be adjusted accordingly.

Putting the copy-ing into a job and streaming several of them in
parallel (with different target file prefixes or groups) might be
helpful in increasing the throughput if multiple disc drives are
involved. (Details are left as an exercise for the reader :-)

Lars.

(only speaking for lappel here, not for the German RC @grc.hp.com)