A headless computer entity having a plurality of disk drives self-restores to a known state upon failure of either a system disk drive containing an operating system of the computer entity or failure of a data disk drive containing application data. Depending upon whether the system disk and/or data disk are replaced by a replacement disk, the computer entity configures itself with either deletion of application data on the data disk or deletion of application data on both the system and data disks. The computer entity determines whether a new replacement disk has been installed by comparing a signature of the system disk with a signature of the data disk. If a replacement disk is detected, the computer entity sets the digital signatures such that the system and data disks have a self-consistent set of hardware-specific digital signatures. Application data is returned to a known good state after deletion.