boot floppy that automatically formats hard drive.

[aircooled]

I need to make a boot floppy that automatically formats the harddrive.
My company just replaced 80 computers with new ones and I have to format the hard drives on all the old ones before we get rid of them, and I'd like to streamline and automate the process.

Anything redily available? or any scripts I can add to a windows boot floppy?

Thanks!

 

[nageov3t]

how about investing in a giant magnet? 🙂

 

[EagleKeeper]

Put in an autoexec.bat file the command
FORMAT C:



You may have to determine the proper switchs to remove the request for additional information.
Stick in the floppy, reset the system after ensuring the the floppy is looked at first.

 

[aircooled]

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper
Put in an autoexec.bat file the command
FORMAT C:



You may have to determine the proper switchs to remove the request for additional information.
Stick in the floppy, reset the system after ensuring the the floppy is looked at first.

Yeah, thats what I've got going on now. Just got to figure out the switches to make it happen without my input....

Thanks!

 

[EagleKeeper]

Format /?

 

[djheater]

Originally posted by: EagleKeeper
Foirmat /?

I don't see an option for silent or force... they may not want it to be that simple and to be honest I think that'd be a bit scary. You could throw that disk in somebody's machine before leaving at night and BAM....
You do have to spell it right:

Well I tried to paste the contents of the CMD and there are to many quotes in brackets.... 🙂

Look here

 

[aircooled]

yep, for safety reasons I can't do it using the format command. Here's what I did find I can do.

Format a hard drive. Ghost it onto CD, setup answer files in Ghost for silent imaging.

That will help me automate this a bit. Unfortunatley alot of these PC's dont even have CD ROM drives.

 

[EagleKeeper]

You could dig around for a key generator that will allow the Format command to have the answers fed back to it.

It may be just easier to answer the couple of questions for the Format command and then move on to the next unit.

as was stated, formatting is considered to be dangerous; they do not want it to be just done by accident.

 

[Kelemvor]

We use a boot disk that has ghost on it. It just read sin a ghost image that just puts on the files needed to boot. Takes all of about 30 seconds or so. It's not making the data unrecoverable real well (we have a different boot disk for that) but it works to just blank it out and boot up to a DOS prompt.

Basically what aircooled said. And it's all on a Disk, not a CD.

 

[AdamSnow]

Killdisk.com

Works like a charm 🙂