Partition disk  and Erase disk

Deployment solution which has various deployment features like deploying and managing servers, desktops, and notebooks from a centralized location in your environment. Deployment solution offers OS deployment, configuration, PC personality migration, and software deployment across hardware platforms and OS types and offers disk management by providing  Partition disk and erase disk tasks.

Deployment Solution 7.1 uses a Gdisk utility to perform the disk operations , this is a same utility which is been used in Deployment solution 6.9 and Ghost solution suite 2.5.1

In this article I will try to cover a simple way of Performing disk operations like create partition , delete partition and formatting of the disk. User will use this task while performing imaging tasks , scripted OS install task or software install task  etc;

Gdisk is very fast and reliable tool for the disk operations. Gdisk utility is not free ,you get this utility along with Ghost solution suite and Deployment Solution (all versions).

The very basic operations which user frequently perform on the target from DS console are Partition disk and Erase disk .

Partition Disk

This task allows user to perform  create partition operation on the client machine’s disk drive ; From Jobs and task in the NS UI open a task window and select Partition Disk task;

Provide the name for the task , Click on the tab Add to add the partition , by this option you can provide the different options while creating a partition , Different partition options present similar to when a partition is created form Windows disk management  console like Disk number, primary or secondary disk , Partition file system format FAT32 / NTFS , Partition type extended / Logical  and size, it similar to FDISK and FORMAT utilities;

Followings’ are the options :

     Is Secondary disk- The disk that you want to partition is a secondary disk.
     Disk Number-The drive that the partition is created on.
     Format-  The format of the partition: Fat32, NTFS, and EXT.
     Partition -  The type of partition to create: Extended, Logical, and Primary
     Mark Partition as Active-  This option is selected automatically for Primary partitions. For Extended & Logical, it is disabled. for more than one primary partitions only one partition can be active at a time.
     Size - Percent-The size of the partition as a percentage of the total drive.
     Size - Fixed Size-The size of the partition as a specific size.

Erase Disk

By using Erase disk task GDisk lets you delete data and partitions on your disk or wipe your entire disk, Select the appropriate disk while performing any erase disk tasks. This also Retire computers by securely disposing of confidential data. You can choose to erase only the system disk. Or, you can configure the task to erase all of the disks. The Erase disk task does not operate on any disk that is connected via the USB or FireWire interface.

Followings are different possible options:

Remove Partitions – All the partitions of selected disk will get deleted
Erase data – All the partition along with data will be erased
Erase disk  -This will wipe out the complete data based on the options provided
System disk – Wipe out the data of the system partition
All Disk – Wipe out all the disks
Secure erase – Wipe out data more than once

GDisk’s secure disk wiping feature wipes data according to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5220.22-M standard.

By selecting Secure erase following group of operations is performed on the hard drive six times:

  •  All addressable locations are overwritten with 0x35.

  •  All addressable locations are overwritten with 0xCA.

  •  All addressable locations are overwritten with a pseudo-random character.

  •  All addressable locations are verified in hardware using the Verify Sectors command to the disk.

Note:  Using the Secure erase option, this task has a 36-hour timeout value on the task server. If this task runs on a client that has a hard disk larger than 375 GB, the task reports as failed on the task server.

However, the task continues to run on the client until it completes.

To confirm a disk wipe , you can manually verify this by running gdisk32.exe from command line.  The view:n command-line switch lets you view the overwrite pattern on the disk, to confirm the overwrite has occurred. This lets you display one or more sectors, starting at sector n, of a physical disk on screen (by default, 1 sector shall be displayed). Sector numbers start at 0.

GDisk supports all operations on disks up to 2 TB, and can also wipe disks larger than 2 TB.

The Gdisk utility is available at : <NS Server>\ Deployment\Task Handler\ghost\x86 ; You can use this utility independently from command line and cannot be executed for the remote machines without NS Console; Use respected architecture utility for x86 and x64 , you will find gdisk32.exe and gdisk64.exe and for linux use gdisk which will be available in respective folders. For the detail supported operations find the information using ‘gdisk32.exe /?’ Command.

Gdisk utility can be executed from different platforms like from production Windows OS , WinPE OS (Automation), Linux OS , but user should make sure they have provided the correct disk and partition number while any delete or erase operations.

Gdisk also supports the machine which has a RAID configured , you can perform all gdisk operations on the raid partitions.

Unlike Fdisk, which uses interactive menus and prompts, GDisk is command-line driven. This offers quicker configuration of a disk's partitions and the ability to define GDisk operations in a batch file.

And user can use this utility in his scripts independent of the NS UI , mainly gdisk can be clubbed with scripted OS Install and Imaging tasks, here is one example;

Sample script can include these commands line switches to perform a clean imaging task.

 gdisk32 1 /del /all
gdisk32 1 /cre /pri /for /q /y
ghost32 -clone,mode=load,src=z:\images\WinXPsp2.gho,dst=1 -sure -auto -batch 

The Ghost implementation guide which is available with all DS installation (Check at: <NS Server>\ Deployment\Task Handler\ghost) has all the details about the commands and there format, these are very simple and explained in the document with examples.