Software installer on hardware appliance

To use the Sophos XG SFOS software installer on a Sophos hardware appliance you'll have to wipe the first couple of sectors of the internal disk. This is because the installer checks for an appliance serial number on disk and will refuse to install of this serial number is detected. By wiping the first gigabyte of the disk we ensure that this serial number is no longer present.

To wipe these sectors we need a USB flash drive with a live Linux distribution in order to be able execute `dd`. Prepare a flash drive with your live distribution of choice and boot this on the appliance. When the Linux distribution has loaded we can execute the following command to wipe the serial from disk:

 

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512KB count=2048