I've a nifty little task at work. Got about 2500 hard drives, of various types and sizes, that need to be repartitioned and formatted to ext3. Im setting up 6 whiteboxes on a rack with kvm to do this. What I want to do is create a boot CD to run a script that will wipe the partition table then format the drive and pipe the results to a file that is displayed when the task is completed. I keep running into snags and script crashes when I attempt this. The drives that fail to format are going to be manually inspected and RMA'ed if necessary.

Anyone have any advice, tips, perhaps a distro out there that I am yet to find? Believe me, I've googled this to death every thing I have found requires user interaction which defeats the purpose, I could format them manually like I have been just as quick.