| Sys Admin Extraordinaire |

For the past week I’ve been trying to find a product that would do the following:

1.) Boot older Dell PowerEdge servers off a USB drive or CD.
2.) Recognize and access the RAID volumes.
3.) Let me run some type of DoD-level disk wiping utility on the RAID volumes.

We have several older servers that we’d like to give away or trash, but need to wipe the drives before doing so.

It didn’t seem like an obscure request, but after doing a few searches, I was surprised to not find anything that really met my needs. Since my company has a CD and license for Kill Disk 5.0, I looked on their Web site but didn’t find any really useful info. They referred you to other resources for instructions on how to make bootable discs with SCSI/RAID drivers. Ok, that’s pretty lame support there. Note that I’m only using Kill Disk because my company already has a license. If it was my choice, I wouldn’t use it.

I know about DBAN, but I didn’t see any good instructions on how to make it recognize the Dell RAID controllers and volumes. I ended up spending several hours Thursday and Friday playing with BartPE and Kill Disk and finally got basically what I needed.

I knew about BartPE from my previous job and when I saw how simple it was to add support for RAID and SCSI drivers, I decided to use that. I originally wanted to use DBAN, but since it’s LINUX-based, I didn’t know of any way to get DBAN to work in BartPE.

So in a nutshell, here’s what I did. Hopefully you’re reading this and can save a few hours by learning from it.

1.) Read the instructions on how to add SCSI/RAID drivers to BartPE (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/help/english/drivers.htm) and download the necessary drivers from Dell (or whatever server brand you’re using). You’ll need the Windows XP or Windows 2003 drivers. Since the driver files are small, you should download the drivers for every server model you have so that you can boot into all the servers with one boot disc.

2.) Make a BartPE boot disc (http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/). I got several errors while building the disc on my laptop and ended having to build it on another laptop rather than spend more time troubleshooting. There could also have been some issues with me using the Dell OEM Windows XP CD, so I used a different XP CD.

After adding some Dell SAS drivers and building the disc with no errors, I got the “percsas.sys not found” error when booting with BartPE. Searching for that error led me to http://hotware.wordpress.com/2006/09/27/creating-a-bart-pe-boot-cd-fur-dell-poweredge-2950-servers-with-perc-5i-controller/ where someone mentioned using Windows Server 2003 to build the disc. I didn’t even know that Windows Server 2003 was an option for BartPE.

After I switched to Windows Server 2003 Standard R2 SP2, I no longer got the “percsas.sys not found” error and BartPE was able to boot up and recognize the RAID volumes in a PowerEdge 2400, 4400, and 1950.

3.) My company has a CD and license for Kill Disk 5.0 (http://www.killdisk.com) so I decided to use that. I found a BartPE plugin for Kill Disk (http://www.aptv38.dsl.pipex.com/Plugins/pluginlist.htm) but I couldn't get it to work with my version. So I figured that I could just copy the Kill Disk exe from the installation on my laptop into the BartPE include folder.

Well, that worked, but sort of; Kill Disk opened up in trial mode. (Note: trial mode only allows a single-pass wipe.) Apparently there are some config files that the exe looks for to get the registration info. If it doesn’t see that, it opens in trial mode and you have to enter the reg info during runtime. I decided to copy everything (except the iso file) from the Kill Disk program folder on my laptop to the BartPE include folder. After booting up with this new iteration of my BartPE disc, Kill Disk opened up fully registered.

Great, now everything was working exactly as I wanted. I then decided to update BartPE to the latest version of A43 File Management Utility (http://www.primitus.us/a43/). After doing that, Kill Disk opened up in trial mode again. This was not a show stopper as I decided to make a text file with the registration info and put it in the include folder. If Kill Disk comes up in trial mode again, all I need to do is copy and paste the reg info in. Oh well, you can’t have your cake and eat it too . . .

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Data Storage, IT Security, Server Hardware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.