How to reformat a harddrive on windows xp

Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile.

Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. By Tim Fisher. Tim Fisher. Tim Fisher has more than 30 years' of professional technology experience. He's been writing about tech for more than two decades and serves as the VP and General Manager of Lifewire. Reviewed by Ryan Perian. Tweet Share Email. What to Know Open Disk Management, locate and right-click the disk you'd like to format.

Choose Format. Enter a name for the drive. Under Allocation unit size , choose Default. Uncheck Perform a quick format. It's a good idea to check all settings and to familiarize yourself with their functions before proceeding.

Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. You may also want to note the make and model of your devices. Once inside the Device Manager, you can click on each category to see what devices are installed. Method 2. You may also use the Windows XP Setup disks. If using the disks you will have to install each disk when prompted during the setup. Press any key to boot from CD when prompted.

This prompt will appear shortly after the POST power-on self test. Go to source. Press the F8 key to agree to the Microsoft end user license agreement when prompted to do so. Since there is already an existing Windows XP installation you may receive a prompt to repair it. Press the ESC key to bypass this option and continue formatting the disk.

Select each field that does not say "Unallocated Space. Use the arrow keys to select fields to be deleted. Press the D key to delete each field. When prompted, press the L key to confirm partition deletion.

This will clear old data from the hard drive of the computer. Repeat steps 6 and 7 until the only field left is "Unallocated Space. Press enter to create a new partition of the maximum size. Method 3. Use the arrow keys to select the new partition. Press enter to install Windows XP to the unallocated space.

This will be followed by a list of installation options. Select Quick Format installation. You will want to select the NTSF file system. That is the preferred file system of Windows XP. If you're reformatting to recover from error, you will want to do a Full Format otherwise your error may still exist.

The PC should restart, then select your language and local preferences when prompted to do so. There are quick selection options or you can click on custom settings to receive more options. Enter your desired password. When the administrator password prompt comes up you can enter your desired password. Actually, nowadays cleaning hard disk is not a complicated work, and you can easily and securely erase disk using disk wipe software.

DiskGenius is free software for permanently data wiping. With this hard disk eraser, you can wipe all data on by filling disk sector by sector, making files unrecoverable. Here are features of disk wiping function:. The following content introduces how to erase data in difference situations, and you can choose which to use in line with actual demands, for instance, you want to clear an SD card or other removable devices, Case 1 is the proper solution; if you want to wipe computer, then go to Case 2.

By way of the free disk erasure DiskGenius Free Edition, you can completely wipe hard drives and removable drives via rewriting sectors to 00 or random characters. Thus, files on the hard drive cannot be recovered by any method, ensuring privacy. Connect the removable device to your computer and make sure it can be recognized by Windows. Install and run DiskGenius from your PC and you can see all local disks and portable devices on the main interface.

Select the external hard drive or SD card you want to erase data, and select " Erase Sectors " option under Tools menu. Select items to fill disk sectors and click Erase button on the popped-up window. There are four options to fill disk sectors in the drop-down list, i.

You can either choose one from "00, FF and Random Data", or specify item to fill disk. DiskGenius asks confirmation for the action, click Erase button to continue. Since the process wipes data permanently, you should make sure you are erasing correcting disk and important files have been backed up. Step 6. The disk eraser starts wiping data on selected drive and the process may take long time if the disk has very large capacity.

In this example, you can learn how to wipe a computer's main hard drive where Windows is installed. Operating system does not allow to erase system while it is running, and we can only wipe non-system partitions. The following steps show how to reboot computer to WinPE version directly and then erase system disk. Launch the free disk wipe tool DiskGenius from your Windows computer.

It takes about two minutes to create booting information for Windows PE, please wait it to complete with patience. Once the application is ready to reboot, it prompts to restart and backup data. Click " OK " button and computer reboots. Select computer's system hard drive where Windows is installed and click " Erase Sectors " option which can be found under Tools menu.

Click Erase button and the software starts wiping the disk. Note: Once the process finishes, the computer cannot boot to system, as system partition have been erased. You need to make a clean system installation on the hard disk. Case 3: Wipe a single file or folder on hard drive. Erasing an entire hard drive takes too much time, and you don't have to do that if you just want to erase certain existing files on the disk.

On account that deleting files by emptying Recycle Bin does not wipe data complete, we should do extra operation to make files unrecoverable.

Files deleted in this way cannot be recovered by any recovery software or professionals. Let's have a close look at how to wipe files and folders:.

Launch DiskGenius again, and locate files you want to permanently delete. Select those files and right-click them to choose " Delete Files Permanently ". Click " Permanently Delete " button on the popped-up window. In order to completely delete the file, the application will refill hard drive sectors taken by the file during deletion.

By default, it overwrites data by filling zeros which can be modified to random data as well. Step 3. Otherwise, the SSD's life span would be reduced. 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.