Everyone,

I have just received a load of 100+ computers off corporate lease for the school district I manage, and while imaging them in SCCM, i've noticed that of those 100 computers about 7 or 8 have failed during the task sequence.  Just on a guess, I tried booting up off a windows 7 disk and physically deleting all partitions and THEN running the task sequence it fixes the issue and the task sequence jumps off/completes without any problems (which there's only been one main partition and one system reserve partition).

My question to you all, I want ALL computers that run my task sequences to completely wipe ALL partitions...and then go forward with the standard partitioning step that's in the task sequence (Step name Partition Disk 0 - BIOS, where it sets up a 350mb system reserve and then a 100% remaining space NTFS windows Primary partition)

Can someone point me in the right direction?  I feel this is a simple process to add to my task sequence, but I wanted to confirm with some of you that might can ease my anxiety a bit first. 

Thanks so much!

• Edited by Jon Ed Rowe, Magnolia Schools Tuesday, February 11, 2014 6:38 PM

You could do an answer file for diskpart that runs before the actual partitioning. You can do this by doing a package out of diskpart answer file.

Example diskpart.txt

select disk 0
clean

Basically you add a Run Command Line step before the native TS disk partition steps (in WinPE), configure it to use your Package that has diskpart.txt and for the commandline add diskpart /s diskpart.txt

If you want to do a secure deletion of all the data, change "clean" to "clean all", note that this will take a lot more time though...

• Proposed as answer by narcoticoo Tuesday, February 11, 2014 8:08 PM
• Edited by narcoticoo Tuesday, February 11, 2014 8:11 PM

as above, you could even use a prestart command to achieve this before displaying the task sequence however i'd be VERY careful about doing so, as you could end up wiping out a whole estate of computers without intending to if you deploy it to the wrong collection or wrong query, far better to keep the logic in the task sequence as a scripted diskpart step (or two)

you can download a diskpart script and view the associated step in the following task sequence

as above, you could even use a prestart command to achieve this before displaying the task sequence however i'd be VERY careful about doing so, as you could end up wiping out a whole estate of computers without intending to if you deploy it to the wrong collection or wrong query, far better to keep the logic in the task sequence as a scripted diskpart step (or two)