How to perform a hard disk wipe using the Ghost utility called GDisk

Products

• Deployment Solution
• Ghost Solution Suite

Issue/Introduction

 

Resolution

Question
How to preform a hard disk wipe using the Ghost utility called GDisk.

Answer

When reallocating hardware from one person to another, it is often important to ensure that none of the old data from the hard disk can be retrieved, even after deploying a new imaging to the computer.

The GDisk utility (one of the Ghost tools included with Deployment Solution 6.9 SP1 - Ghost Solution Suite 3.0) is a multipurpose disk management utility that includes a secure disk wiping feature. GDisk’s secure disk wiping feature wipes data according to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) 5220.22-M standard. According to this standard, the following group of operations is performed six times:

• All addressable locations on the hard disk are overwritten with 0x35.

• All addressable locations on the hard disk are overwritten with 0xCA.

• All addressable locations on the hard disk are overwritten with a pseudorandom character.

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

 

Running GDisk to Securely Wipe a Disk

GDisk can be run from a DOS (GDisk.exe), WinPE (GDisk32.exe or GDisk64.exe), or Linux (Gdisk) pre-boot operating system using the following syntax:

gdisk disk /diskwipe /dodwipe

The following table explains the GDisk command-line elements.

 

Element	Description
gdisk	The Gdisk executable used, such as GDisk.exe (for DOS) or GDisk32.exe (for WinPE).
disk	The physical disk to be wiped. Replace disk with a number between 1 and 128.
/diskwipe	Instructs GDisk to perform a disk wipe.
/dodwipe	Instructs GDisk to perform the required wipes meeting the DoD standards.

 

Example: gdisk.exe 1 /diskwipe /dodwipe

This command runs the DOS version of GDisk and wipes the first drive using the DoD standards.

Sample Symantec wipe disk jobs ships with Deployment Solution and can be found in the Samples job folder.