Clean Hard Drive Before Sale

oldbear

If I read you correctly you want to clean up the old hard drive and load XP on it before you sell the drive or the computer?

You also say ....

You can only install one copy of XP from an install CD on one computer - see EULA. Although you can physically install on other computers those installs will not activate.

Ghosting an image from one computer to another would not be legal either.

If all you want to do is clean the drive I suggest use Nuke Boot Disk, format it and sell it.

 

That is correct, but there would be no operating system on a new drive as purchased anyway?

Simply formatting an old hard drive is insufficient to prevent somebody unscrupously recovering data from it - to be secure in this respect the data on the disk should be overwritten several times, preferably to government or military standards.

I'm afraid you've lost me there What would be the point of ghosting a drive then formatting that drive and reloading the ghost image? You gain nothing.

My apologies if we are at cross purposes, but I am finding it difficult to establish exactly what you are trying to achieve here.

 

If you have only one copy of XP (cd), and you are using that copy on computer 1, and wish to use it on computer 2, then to legally sell that computer 1 you must completely remove XP from it prior to selling it. To legally sell computer 1 with XP on it you will need to purchase a second copy of XP (cd), or use the buyer's copy of XP. Ghost has NO use in the sale.