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What happens if disk sanitization is interrupted

Contributors netapp-forry

If disk sanitization is interrupted by user intervention or an unexpected event such as a power outage, ONTAP takes action to return the disks that were being sanitized to a known state, but you must also take action before the sanitization process can finish.

Disk sanitization is a long-running operation. If the sanitization process is interrupted by power failure, system panic, or manual intervention, the sanitization process must be repeated from the beginning. The disk is not designated as sanitized.

If the formatting phase of disk sanitization is interrupted, ONTAP must recover any disks that were corrupted by the interruption. After a system reboot and once every hour, ONTAP checks for any sanitization target disk that did not complete the formatting phase of its sanitization. If any such disks are found, ONTAP recovers them. The recovery method depends on the type of the disk. After a disk is recovered, you can rerun the sanitization process on that disk; for HDDs, you can use the -s option to specify that the formatting phase is not repeated again.