What's the best way to reformat a hard drive remotely?

There are a number of ways to remotely format a hard disk. Some products are security-related and are designed to perform a remote wipe of the hard drive on a computer that has been lost or stolen. Other utilities are geared more toward bare-metal deployments and can be used to prepare the hard disk and deploy an operating system to a brand-new computer that is attached to the network.

If the goal is to simply format a hard drive on a remote computer, then the easiest way of doing so might be to use Windows PowerShell. PowerShell can be used to run commands against a remote system. The first thing that you'll have to do, however, is to enable PowerShell remoting. You can accomplish this by entering the following command: Enable-PSRemoting –Force

What you will have to do next depends on whether the computers are on an Active Directory domain. If the computers are not participating on the Active Directory, configure the Windows Remote Management (WinRM) service to trust other computers. To trust every computer on the network, enter these commands (you don't have to do this for domain members):

Set-Item wsman:\localhost\client\trustedhosts *

Restart-Service WinRM

Now you should be able to establish a remote session with the computer in question. There are a number of ways of doing this, but I prefer the Enter-PSSession command:

Enter-PSSession –ComputerName <the name of the remote computer>

Depending on how the computers are set up, you may have to append the –Credential switch and a username to log into the remote system.

Once the session has been established, you can format a hard drive on the remote computer by entering the following command:

Format-Volume –DriveLetter <the drive letter that you want to use>