Deployment Solution

Hi,

I would like to wipe my disk the quickest way possible. At the moment it seems to takes a long time 30mins.

How can i archive this?

.\Ghost\Gdisk32.exe /diskwipe /disk:all

This is what i use at the moment, but it is taking too long.

Regards

If you are not concerned about being able to recover data, a simple quick format would work. But that would allow for data to be recovered from the wiped drive. If you want the drive wiped clean with minimal chance that any data could ever be recovered, it will take time as the software (both GDISK and WIPE) will over-write each sector several times. The larger the drive, the longer it will take.

Also, please remember, even GDISK or WIPE do not guarantee that data will not be recoverable. The only true way as per DOD guidelines is to destroy the disk.

I have a IBM t400 that has 3 partitions. I would like to remove all partitions and then deploy the image. what do you recommend the best/ quickest way to do this. I am not concerned about data recovery.

I would do a quick format using an operating system such as WinPE, WinXP, or the like. Or blast an image onto the drive (a blank image would probably work well in that situation).

If you have an image you want to deploy to the client just deploy the image. No reason to wipe the disk first at all if you aren't concerned about data recovery.

I have tried to deploy it but it always comes back with an error RDEPLOY: The operation was cancelled. Nothing in the Rdeploy logs.

I then have to wipe the disk and then it deploys fine.

That's pretty strange. I would think RDeploy would give some reason why it was canceled or give back an actual error.
I would do what bhawver suggested. Do you quick format then deploy the image.

The only time I have seen something like this is with Ghost and with a fresh drive from the manufacturer (i.e. a warranty replacement from Dell). In that circumstance, it was necessary to either do a quick format after partitioning it, or to create a small blank image (i.e. just a partition with no files in it). Never had this issue with RDeploy.

when you mean small blank image, you mean the following?

1 wipe the whole disk then capture an image?

2 can i create this blank image from any laptop? the problem machines are at a remote site.

I believe Altiris comes with a blank FAT32.IMG file that is in the images folder. It also comes with DOS_ONLY.IMG. Either of these should work as it is creating a file table to use. If that doesn't work (i.e. these fail as well, then you may need to just partition the drive using fdisk (or a similar utility).

I just had a thought, the drives that you are using didn't happen to have any file encryption on them did they? I've heard of that being an issue (although, I don't know how to solve that).