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Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller 9 User's Guide

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Erasing physical disks

The System Erase feature allows you to erase the contents of the physical drives. This feature is accessible using RACADM or the LC GUI. Physical drives on the server are grouped into two categories.
  • Secure erase drives— Includes drives that provide cryptographic erase such as ISE and SED SAS and SATA drives, and PCIe SSDs.
  • Overwrite erase drives— Includes all drives that do not support cryptographic erase.
NOTE:Before erasing vFlash, you must first detach all partitions using iDRAC interfaces before executing the operation.
NOTE: System erase only applies to drives within the server. iDRAC is not able to erase drives in an external enclosure such as a JBOD.
The RACADM SystemErase sub-command includes options for the following categories:
  • The SecureErasePD option cryptographically erases all the secure erase drives.
  • The OverwritePD option overwrites data on all drives.
NOTE:Cryptographic Erase of BOSS physical disk can be done by  SystemErase method and it is supported from LC-UI, Wsman, and Racadm
Before performing SystemErase, use the following command to check the erase capability of all physical disks for a server: 
# racadm storage get pdisks –o –p SystemEraseCapability
NOTE: If SEKM is enabled on the server, then disable SEKM using the racadm sekm disable command before using this command. This can avoid any storage devices being locked out which are secured by iDRAC, if SEKM settings are erased from iDRAC by executing this command.
To erase ISE and SED drives, use this command: 
# racadm systemerase –secureerasepd
To erase overwrite erase drives, use the following command: 
# racadm systemerase -overwritepd
NOTE:RACADM SystemErase removes all the virtual disks from the physical disks that are erased by the above commands.
NOTE:RACADM SystemErase causes the server to restart in order to perform the erase operations.
NOTE:Individual PCIe SSD or SED devices can be erased using the iDRAC GUI or RACADM. For more information, see the Erasing PCIe SSD device data and the Erasing SED device data section.

For information on the System Erase function within the Lifecycle Controller GUI, see the Dell Lifecycle Controller User's Guide available at https://www.dell.com/idracmanuals .

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