Automated MBR wipe CD

[monday90]

Ok before anyone says "why would you want a disk that wipes your system without any intervention" I work in a training environment, usually at the end of a module we get the students to boot off a delpart disc and manually delete any partitions they have. I took over a classroom last week which had not been reset meaning that I had to manually delete the partitions off 30 machines. I'm looking for a CD preferably based on Linux that is fully automated in clearing the MBR of any given system.

We used to have a floppy disk which was I believe dos driven and used gdisk.exe however not many of our machines have floppy drives anymore and the disk couldn't access SATA disks either.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Rubberman]

You should be able to create a freedos bootable cd or USB thumbdrive with an autoexec.bat file which will do this for you with gdisk.exe.

[monday90]

Many thanks,
I was kind of hoping for a GPL based solution though. I'm having a go at remastering a tinycore CD but I think it will be overkill for my purposes. All I need is something that detects my hard drive then runs:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

I was hoping there was something already out there but I guess not. As soon as I have something workable then I'll release it to everyone.

Regards.

Monday90

[Rubberman]

Well, FreeDos is FOSS. Not all open source, GPL's software is Linux-based.

[monday90]

Yes it is. However Gdisk isn't. Its part of Symmantec's Ghost suite. The legitimacy of our use of it has been dubious. I think I'm getting somewhere with Tinycore, I'll test it tomorrow.