@mtn038 Can you post the contents of /etc/exports, the menu entry you created for Mint, the full path to your Mint files, and how you’re trying to boot (nfs, http, raw iso)?

@mtn038 Can you post the contents of /etc/exports, the menu entry you created for Mint, the full path to your Mint files, and how you’re trying to boot (nfs, http, raw iso)?

@Tom-Elliott Here’s the scenario:
I have large stacks of SATA and PATA HDDs that all need to be wiped. I only have 1 PC with PATA support that can boot (it also has support for 4 SATA drives).

Wiping them all at once with a FOG task would be the most convenient solution for me, since I could check the progress from any PC in the network. Originally, I considered my options for wiping these disks to be (in order of convenience/preference):

• Schedule full wipes on all drives at once in FOG (hence my question)

• Put a single hard drive in the PC, schedule a wipe, and keep checking in the task manager in FOG, then replace them. I wouldn’t have to keep switching my monitor and keyboard+mouse around, but it would be less convenient than being able to cram 6 disks in at once and wipe them all.

• Load the PC up, boot into Xubuntu live (I’ve already got that set up in FOG) and wipe all the drives. The problem with that is I have 1 monitor, 1 mouse, and 1 keyboard, so I’ll have to keep switching back and forth to get my other work done and also check on the status of the wipe.

It’s not that I want to wipe them in parallel, either; I’d just love to be able to say, “queue up full wipes on all disks present in the host” and then go about my work.

To be clear, this isn’t a feature request. I was just asking whether it wipes 1 or multiple drives, since I’m not knowledgeable enough to fully understand the scripts and functions used for wipes. I’ll have to learn how to write postinit scripts and work on that (which I’m definitely eager to do!) so I can spend as little time as possible manually attending to these drives.

I’m an intern and the only IT staff at a non-profit neighborhood center, so my resources are extremely limited. FOG has already helped me so much and saved me an incredible amount of time and frustration. Thank you for making such a great tool! I hope I’ll be able to contribute soon.

Actually, my goal is to wipe all disks present in the host with one task. If I could fill all of the PC’s SATA and PATA slots and set a full wipe task for all of them, I could wipe everything much faster than if I were to wipe a single disk at a time. Plus, I could use the task manager to check the progress, instead of switching my monitor input and keyboard+mouse to the second computer.

I did something similar; I’ve got two WinPEs (x86 and x86_64) booting via http and a Xubuntu live image booting via nfs.

Trying to boot the entire iso is possible (the Plop Linux network booting page has some useful info), but there are some caveats:

• If you take a live ISO (like Ubuntu desktop) and boot it raw (which is what your menu options are attempting to do) with PXE, you probably won’t be able to install from it, because of the way the live session mounts the install files. I wasted almost an entire day trying to get that to work.

• It will have to load the entire ISO before it boots, so it could take a while. When I set up my WinPE boot, I used an ISO and it took several minutes to load every time I tried to boot it.

What I settled on for my Xubuntu live image is booting over NFS (I used the Hirens 15.04 section of the FOG wiki’s “Include any ISO in the FOG Bootmenu” guide as a template. When I was trying to use http, I couldn’t install on the local disk, but with NFS, I can! it might be that I don’t know enough about (i)PXE to figure out how to get http to work, but I decided to stick with NFS.

I just unpacked the ISO into a folder in my NFS share and added the menu entry in FOG.

Here’s my menu entry for Xubuntu:

kernel nfs://${next-server}/images/xubuntu/casper/vmlinuz.efi
initrd nfs://${next-server}/images/xubuntu/casper/initrd.lz
imgargs vmlinuz.efi acpi=off root=/dev/nfs boot=casper netboot=nfs nfsroot=${next-server}:/images/xubuntu locale=en_US.UTF-8 keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=us mirror/country=US
boot

And here’s my menu entry for WinPE (32-bit):

cpuid --ext 29 && set arch x86
kernel http://${next-server}/winpe_x86/wimboot
initrd http://${next-server}/winpe_x86/BOOT/BCD BCD
initrd http://${next-server}/winpe_x86/BOOT/BOOT.SDI BOOT.SDI
initrd http://${next-server}/winpe_x86/BOOT/BOOT.WIM BOOT.WIM
boot

In case you’re interested, I created the WinPE boot files using Microsoft’s “Configure a PXE server to load Windows PE” guide. Then I got the (rough) menu entry from iPXE’s “Network-booting Windows PE” page.

I’ve got a stack of old PATA and SATA HDDs with sensitive information on them that I need to wipe. I already use FOG for most of my work, so using it to wipe all these drives would be pretty simple for me.

However, I can’t find any information about which drive(s) the wipe activities run on. It’d be a hassle to swap drives out one at a time to wipe them (I’ve only been able to scrounge up one PC with PATA support that will actually boot).

I’m not very knowledgeable about bash scripting, but from what I can understand of the fog.wipe script and the getHardDisk() function in funcs.sh, it looks like it only looks for and wipes 1 drive. Is that correct?