"Sanitizing" a Point 4 IRIS system

This page is a part of the "Understanding IRIS" collection.  Many thanks to David Takle, for figuring this out, and sharing this with us:

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One solution is to boot up your configuration and then do the following:

# INSTALL AND CLEAR 0.1
# INSTALL AND CLEAR 0.2
# INSTALL AND CLEAR 0.3
# INSTALL AND CLEAR 0.4

Each time you will be asked if you really want to clear the LU (Y/N).

And then it will ask what you want the new LU# to be. Just enter the same LU# (1,2,3,4).

This command creates an empty LU, with a new INDEX and ACCOUNTS file. 

However, this usually limits MANAGER to a couple thousand blocks on the extra LU's.

You can use the UTILITY program to modify the account settings on each LU.

You might even want to delete extra accounts from LU0.

Unfortunately, the UTILITY program is not very intuitive. If you need help figuring it out let me know.

Also, if you are still concerned that some one might know how to recover the data sitting on the drive, you can write a program to wipe it out.

For example (once MANAGER has enough blocks allocated to it)

 10 IF  ERR 0 STOP

 20 DIM F$[512]

 30 DIM N$[20]

 40 LET F$=" ",F$

 50 DIM 1%,X1

 60 DIM 3%,X3

 70 LET N$="1/FILLER1"

 80 GOSUB 130

 90 LET N$="1/FILLER2"

 100 GOSUB  130

 110 STOP

 120 REM

 130 REM BUILD FILE OF SPACES

 140 BUILD #1,+N$

 150 FOR X3=0 TO 16380

 160   WRITE #1,X3;F$;

 162   REM  show progress

 170   LET X1=X1+1

 180   IF X1<1000 GOTO 220

 190   PRINT ".";

 200   SIGNAL 3,0

 210   LET X1=0

 220 NEXT X3

 230 CLOSE #1

 240 PRINT

 250 RETURN

The above BASIC program will create a couple of 'formatted data files' and fill them up with spaces.

A formatted datafile is limited to 16MB, so we create 2 of them.

The second one will fail at some point due to filling up the LU, and the file will not be saved.

If you type HELP after the fail, it will give you the reason (due to line 10).

So when this is done, you need to remove the 1st file, since it was preserved by the CLOSE stmt.

# KILL 1/FILLER1

If this is all too confusing, I can send you a C114 drive that is cleaned up.

I also have a clean D31 drive we could distribute.

Hope that helps.

~David

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This page is a part of the "Understanding IRIS" collection.