Wipe Windows XP Hard Drive
Best Way to Wipe Windows XP Hard Disk...
With the development in technology and needs of people, the hard disks have become universal choice among us for both business and personal use. HDD are of lightweight, compact and have an excellent ability to back up data and used as an internal drives for your system. Hard drives have a great data storage capacity and can be divided into multiple partitions where each partition works as a separate drive. For proper management of these files on the HDD, the Windows XP based computer makes use of a file system. There are basically two file systems that are supported by Windows XP operating system, i.e. FAT (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (New Technology File System). When you desire to sell or dispose your Windows XP based system hard drive that contains important data, then you need to erase whole data permanently to avoid unauthorized access to your important files. As deleting the files using file management applications does not permanently erase the data completely from your Windows XP HDD. So in order to wipe data permanently from your Windows XP HDD you should use reliable wipe disk software.
When you delete a file or a folder on Windows XP OS, the address that is pointing to the location of that particular file is removed, making that specific file or a folder inaccessible. Thus, deleted files are not visible but they still exist on system storage devices. There are many data recovery utilities available in the market to recover those deleted data. Most of us believe that formatting a storage device like hard drives, erases all its files, but it’s not true. Even after formatting the hard drives or any other storage device does not permanently wipe the files present on it. You can effortlessly restore data from formatted hard drive using relevant data recovery software. The main problem arises while disposing or selling the HDD to the third person. It is very essential to completely wipe the hard disk before selling it to others. There are three different ways to wipe disk drive i.e. demagnetizing, physically destroying the disk and overwriting. But, these methods do not work properly.
So, if you want to permanently wipe Windows XP hard drive you need to make use powerful Wipe Drive utility that uses the US DoD (Department of Defense) security standard to erase the data permanently. It overwrites the data with a character, second pass with the complement of the first character overwrite and in the third pass, it uses random character to overwrite the data. Drive Wipe is effective drive wipe tool that helps in permanently deleting confidential data from hard disk drive and other portable storage devices. It is a popular product mostly used to wipe a disk in Windows OS. This software overwrites any data several times on Windows hard disk drives and other storage media, especially those that are being resold or disposed off. This software can also overwrite the ambient data storage areas like file slack, unallocated file space etc. This tool can also wipe files from memory cards and supports different versions of Windows Operating System such as Windows 7, Vista and XP. Along with US DoD security standard, it also uses 8 other security standards like Fast Zero overwrite, Random Overwrite, Peter Guttmann Secure Deletion, NATO standard, German:VSITR, US navy etc., which can erase logical drive or the entire hard disk based on your requirement. These 9 standards are categorized based on their security level like low, medium and high. You can select appropriate standard to wipe the disk securely and permanently. The software also helps in wiping the specific logical drive permanently.
Steps to wipe partitions from partable external hard drive are as follows:
Step 1: Download Drive Wipe and install the application.
Step 2: Launch the software by selecting the software from Start Menu-> Programs or by clicking on shortcut menu on desktop. Once the software is launched, the main screen appears as shown in Figure 1. Select the USB drive from the list of logical drives and physical hard drives then click on Next button.
Figure 1: Select the drive
Step 3: Now, Select the suitable data shredding pattern among 9 different data shredding patterns and then click on Next button to securely wipe the partition as shown in figure 2.
Figure 2: Select data shredding pattern to wipe drive
Step 4: As you click on Next button, confirmation message is displayed. Click on OK button to continue the data deletion process of selected drive.
