Selling a laptop - Erasing drive data

[rhombus]

Hi, i am going to be selling my laptop soon to a fellow across the country. i just need to know what i need to do to my hard drives before i sell it, so that i dont have any personal information taken.

problem is my OS came preinstalled, so i cant really wipe my C drive, considering all i have is my recovery disks. would it be safe to just do a system recovery with those disks?

then, theres the d drive, which i want to completely delete. is there any free software i can use to do this? thanks to anyone who can help me out.

 

[masterjaw]

Just use the recovery disc. It will return the laptop to its factory settings, including drive partitions.

 

[ductape]

I've used this before but never on a laptop

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

 

[nunyez]

To do it right use something like http://www.dban.org/

Depending on the algorithm you choose it will take anywhere from long to very, very long.