Wipe without boot disc

Hello all, I have an HP dv6500t that I bought used a couple years ago and bought a new laptop last week. I am looking to put my HP up for sale on craigslist but am only marginally tech literate and need to erase/wipe all data off the HP before putting it up for sale. My problem is that when I purchased the HP way back when, it came with Vista installed on it without a boot disc. Last year I upgraded to Win 7 but only purchased the upgrade disc version and am afraid of being stuck trying to sell a laptop without an OS. Any advice would be greatly appreciated and the solution is probably looking me right in the face but I don't realize it.

 

Did you create a recovery image? You can try to restore using that if you really need to. Or do you have the option to restore an image?

Afterwards, there are some hard disk utilities that can zero the free space on a drive, that should clear up any remaining data possibly sitting on the disk after the restore.

 

Eraser will wipe free space from a drive. Remember to wipe the cluster tips as well. It's best to wipe the whole disk and re-install if you can.

You might find it difficult to sell your laptop without install media.

 

Turns out I can use the Win 7 disc I purchased to install the OS from scratch after all. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to due to the outer packaging being labeled "Vista update disc". As I figured, the answer was obvious and I was oblivious. Thank you for the advice though goofball and nankuru.

 

If you're going to do a clean reinstall, my advice to you is to wipe the disk using DBAN first. This will clean the hard drive of your previous file contents. A simple format does not do this and your files can be recovered if the sector (s)on the HDD have not been overwritten.