app/command to write zero's to unused blocks of partition

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Guest

Does anyone know of any winxp apps or commands that can write zero's to all
unused blocks/bits of an ntfs partition? I know some third party security
apps can do variations on this - but we need something that will do just a
single pass and write only all zeros (or all one's I suppose). We are
creating bit level images for 'ghosting' to a bunch of identical machines.
Compressed, the images are only moderately smaller than the full size of the
drive. If we can write zero's to all unused areas of the disk/partition -
the disk images should be greatly compressible.

We are looking for a cheap/free solution but on the other hand are greatly
restricted in what 'unapproved' third party software (i.e general freeware)
we are allowed to use. Something provided by microsoft would be ideal.

Any suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
 
Have a look on Ebay for Drive Image 5 (or later) - you can pick this up for a
reasonable price and it's mainstream software so should be approved. This is
inteligent enough not to include slack space, however for best results you
should defrag first to compact the data in to the first part of the
partition.

You also need to remove the pagefile and system-restore folder to get a
small image, these are the biggest space-wasters. One way to deal with them
on NTFS -without altering settings- is with a BartPE bootdisk. They will be
recreated once XP boots again.

Finally, if you use an image multiple times don't forget to run
sysinternals' NewSID on each one, otherwise all eponymous user-accounts will
be equivalent.
 
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