I have a tower computer, compaq, that I want to give to a needy friend. I want to rid the hard drive of everything but the operating system which is XP. Is there a way to do this? Yes, I want to rid if of all programs also, not just data.

By the way, I do not have the CD with XP for this system and I do not have a backup disk. I guess I could make one if I knew how.

Thanks for any help you can give. John

Jephree or one of the other Moderators might know,I only know how by painstakenly going through all the files induvidually which means spending hours and hopefully not breaking something in the process.

By the way, I do not have the CD with XP for this system and I do not have a backup disk. I guess I could make one if I knew how.

Well, that pretty much says it. You need to "wipe" clean the drive then give the new owner the computer - a very generous offer, I might add! Let the new owner worry about buying their own, legal license for the OS. Or there are plenty of free and very able Linux alternatives.

BTW, if you decide to make a backup copy and give it to this new owner without the original disks, then you become a distributor of illegally copied copyrighted materials. Don't break the law just to be nice.
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From a security standpoint, you should never give away hard drives that might have some of your personal data on them without thoroughly "wiping" the disk with a program designed to obliterate all traces of previously stored data. Eraser works great.

Then, once he gets his own OS, or you find the originals, he can do a fresh install on a freshly purged and formatted drive.

After wiping the drive you can load ubuntu:

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