remotely format a Windows 2000 machine?

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mycomputersucks

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need to format a device that is being decommissioned. I don't have local access, just rdp. i won't need to access it afterward, just need the drive wiped. I did a quick search, didn't find anything. thanks for the help!
 
As long as you have full admin rights to the machine and no kind of group policy in place restricting what a remote user can do you shouldn't have any problems formating a drive with remote desktop.
 
How is he going to format the system drive while RDP'ed in?
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
even if we format the boot drive? i've only done a complete system format while booting into DOS never while in Windows .

so we can open command prompt in windows, run the format commands and the drive will be wiped? i assume at some point it would kick us out of remote desktop. would the machine shut down or something after it's complete?
 
mycomputersucks said:
even if we format the boot drive? i've only done a complete system format while booting into DOS never while in Windows .

so we can open command prompt in windows, run the format commands and the drive will be wiped? i assume at some point it would kick us out of remote desktop. would the machine shut down or something after it's complete?
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You won't be able to format the system partition. In order to achieve this, you will need to have some sort of alternative boot device. You could set the machine to PXE boot and serve up a WinPE image. Once you've booted to that you can format the drive.
 
criccio said:
How is he going to format the system drive while RDP'ed in?
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
Click to expand...

I assumed the OP wasn't trying to format the system drive as it seems obvious that you CAN'T do that remotely while booted into the OS. Any other drive would be no problem however.
 
Are you looking at actually wiping the system or just making it non-bootable? You could delete almost all the data from the system while it's running without a problem. You could probably then blow out the MBR and/or Boot files, leaving it mostly useless.

An actual wipe would be problematic, tho.
 
ameoba said:
Are you looking at actually wiping the system or just making it non-bootable? You could delete almost all the data from the system while it's running without a problem. You could probably then blow out the MBR and/or Boot files, leaving it mostly useless.

An actual wipe would be problematic, tho.
Click to expand...


yeah, unfortunately we need an entire wipe.
 
You can't, you need console access (either physically or through kvm over IP.) Unless you can get some sort of bootsector "virus" that has a format program as part of it's payload.
 
If the system will boot from a flash drive... you could boot up a Linux desktop off the USB flash and then use VNC to control the system? Then you could wipe from the Linux distro and pull the flash drive afterwords.
 
Plugging in a flash drive... changing bios to boot to pxe... yadda yadda ... all kinda hard to do without actually touching the system aye? If it was as easy as having "someone else plug it in", that same person could be told how to easily format the system with an XP disc, right over the phone.
 
/methinks if one could change the MBR and add a little 1GB partition or something, and copy DOS files to that partition, and as soon as it boots up it just runs format c: ????
 
If you had Intel AMT you could do this, but since it's win2k I am assuming it's an older box, and wouldn't support AMT.
 
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