How to Wipe Windows XP Hard Drive Without CD?

Scenario

Wipe Windows XP system hard drive for selling

My Dell computer is running with Windows XP, and I want to wipe the system hard drive to sell the computer. Can anyone help?"

- Question from Forums.Tomsguide.com

Why wipe Windows XP hard drive?

Generally, there are 2 situations where people want to wipe a Windows XP hard drive. The first is you want to sell or give away your system hard drive to others just like the scenario. And it is necessary to erase all data on the disk to protect your personal files from being stolen or copied.

And some people wipe their Windows hard disk for reinstalling system. Sometimes, your computer just become slow, or encounter some problems and can’t be solved. Wiping the Windows disk and having a fresh reinstallation is a good way to deal with those issues and to speed up your computer.

Default resetting and format can’t wipe your Windows XP hard drive clean

When it comes to wiping a Windows XP hard drive, people may want to reset their computers to default settings or insert the system disk into another computer to format it. But actually, both methods can’t wipe your Windows XP hard drive clean.

Default resetting will delete programs, data and restore settings, system back to the original condition. And formatting just hides data from the operation system and rebuilds its file system. So they can’t wipe a disk completely, and those data can be recovered and hacked very easily.

How to wipe Windows XP hard drive without CD?

To wipe their Windows XP, 10, 8, 7 system hard drives without CD, many people will turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard. It is a professional data destruction tool to erase data on a disk clean by overwriting data. With this tool, you don't need any extra USB flash drive, CD, DVD to erase a disk. And thanks to its intuitive interface, all operation can be done in a few steps. You can download it and follow the steps below to see how it works.

✍ Note: If there are some important data on the hard drive, back up the disk or store it to the cloud backup.

Step 1. Click “Wipe” on in the top toolbar, and choose “Wipe Hard Drive”.

Step 2. Choose “Fill sectors with Zero (Safe, Quick)”, and click “OK”.

✍Note: You can upgrade to Professional edition to unlock other wiping methods with bigger strength.
● Fill sectors with random data: It overwrites your Windows XP hard drive with random data. And it is safer than zero-filling method.
● DoD 520.22-M: It overwrite the system hard drive with 3 passes make it is capable of preventing nearly all recovery software to restore data. So it is one of the most common data destruction ways to dispose personal data. But it takes more time to complete.
● Gutmann: It uses 35 passes to overwrite a hard drive, and it is the most thorough way here to wipe a system disk. It provides much higher security but also gives wear to the drive.

Step 3. Then this program sends a message that your computer will not start up the next time after wiping, and click “Yes” to confirm.

Step 4. And click “Apply” in the main interface. And choose “Restart into PreOS mode” and “OK”.

●Additional content: Securely erase SSD

If your Windows XP drive is an SSD that has different read/write method, you can't use the same wiping method to erase data on it. Otherwise, the SSD's life span would be reduced. Fortunately, you can turn to AOMEI Partition Assistant professional. It provides a feature named “SSD Secure Erase” that enables you to wipe Windows XP SSD (SATA port) in Windows 7 environment and then keep its original performance.

Conclusion

When you need to wipe Windows XP hard drive completely without CD to reuse or sell, AOMEI Partition Assistant is a good choice for you. And it works well with different disks, like Dell, Seagate. AOMEI partition Assistant is not only a wiping tool, it has lots of feature for managing disk and computer. For example, you can use it to create a bootable disk, once your computer run into some booting issues, you can boot from it and fix the problems.

And if you this method can be applied to other Windows system disk, including Windows 10, 8, 7. And for the Windows Server system disk, you can use the Server Edition to wipe it.