Steps to Erasing a Hard Drive With Windows XP

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Michael Burton, executive producer for Real Entertainment located in Atlanta, Georgia. We offer full service video production for any project. Now I want to talk to you about the steps in erasing a hard drive on Windows XP. Let me start off by telling you that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am not affiliated with Microsoft. The steps to erasing a hard drive with Windows XP are fairly simple. The first thing you want to do is make sure that you back up all of your files. Externally. Either on a drive or DVD, CDrom. If it's photos, music, any data files that you've created. Anything. You will have to obviously reinstall software programs that you have previously purchased or installed. But this will completely wipe your drive clean. After you've completely backed everything up the next step is to wipe clean or to erase your hard drive. There's a couple ways to do this. There is a program out there called wipe drive that you can look up on line. And just go to Google and type in wipe drive and it'll give you some options. There's also one called kill disk. So we've got wipe drive. You search for that. Here is the WipeDrive official site. WhiteCanyon.com. You also have, there's kill disk and there's a bunch of other programs but as you can see you have to purchase the software. That will completely erase your hard drive and scramble everything so that nobody can read any of your old files. Once you're done with that the way to, what you have to do is, well first of all to tell if it's been wiped clean? You go ahead and reboot your computer and it'll boot in dos and it'll show either an A or a C drive. That's going to show you that you have a completely clean drive. Then what you're going to want to do is take your install disc for your operating system. You should have either received these discs with your computer or when you first turned on your system you were able to create a set of these restart discs, or restore discs. And also if you don't have them or you didn't get, you did not receive them upon purchase, or you were not able to make them you can order them for a small minimal fee through the actual company, through Windows, through Microsoft."