Ghost Solution Suite

Hello,

I'm using SCCM 2012 R2 to deploy a TS that contain gdisk32.exe /DISK:ALL /diskwipe. This command fail with the error "cannot lock disk". The way I'm loading the ts is Boot to PXE and start the TS, so the system HDD isn't used. Why can't I lock the disk?

My goal is to create a TS that will wipe all physical disk and do various configuration before shipping the computer to recycling facilities.

Thank you!

What is a TS?

When you boot via PXE, what operating system are you booting?  

If it is DOS, then unless you have compatibility mode enabled in the BIOS you are not going to be able to "see" the disk as DOS has no support for SATA.

If it is WinPE, does it have the necessary drivers to support your SATA chipset ? Without those, you will be unable to "see" the disk either.  Don't assume the error message is accurate as the disk it may be trying to lock is the virtual one that pxe booted into. Perhaps instead of using /DISK:ALL you should be a bit more specific in order to exclude the disk you have as the boot volume.

Hello,

a TS is a Task Sequence in SCCM.

In PXE, we boot WinPE 5.0 x86. It does have the driver because it says it's locked (else, it would say disk not found). I did try using /disk:all, it does the same error: cannot lock disk. GDisk does detect if it's a virtual drive and doesn't list it, so I know it's the correct drive it's seeing (anyway, 500gig isn't a virtual one). And since it's the same PXE Boot Image we use to install the OS, it require to see the drive.

Thank you

If you can get to the WinPE command prompt, can you try the same operations by starting DISKPART and then trying to erase and configure partitions from the command line? The sequence looks something like this:

1. Type: DISKPART
2. Type: LIST DISK (lis dis) and identify the disk number for your disk device. It will typically be Disk 1, so we will continue on that basis
3. Type: select disk 1 (sel dis 1)
4. Type: clean
5. Type: create partition primary (create part pri). If no size is specified, the full device capacity will be used. Otherwise, append: size=(size in Kb)
6. Type: select partition 1 (sel part 1)
7. Type: active
8. For hard disks type: format fs=ntfs LABEL="BOOT" QUICK. For USB flash memory devices type: format fs=fat32 LABEL="BOOT" QUICK
9. Type: assign
10. Type: exit

Diskpart does work, but my goal is to make a full wipe (0 fill) of the disk because it's getting dispose off. Diskpart won't do that :(

Check out this article:

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH110994.html

Looks like the problem is caused by Ghost being open when you PXE boot. This will lock the disk so it cannot be accessed by GDISK32.
The solution is to close the GHOST32 window.
 

Not the problem because I'm not using Ghost PXE. I'm using SCCM to start a task sequence, which boot into WinPE and start gdisk. Nothing else is running. Even doing it manually yeild the same result.

THank you