Wiping a partition.

Basically, I am selling my HP PAvilion laptop so I can get on with building a pc. Mean as HP are instead of providing recovery cd's they made a recovery partition =/ I need to wipe my personal stuff on my C drive with somthing like DBAN but not to touch the recovery partition. How can I go about this please??

well by starting the recovery on the labtop .........like f8 or f10 at bios screen it will reformat and restore the c: partion to what was at the factory at shipping time

Cheers, but I need to WIPE the partition, not just reformat it, reformat is not secure enough is it? I dont want to wipe the WHOLE hard drive just one partition. Is there any software to do this?

thats basicly what the recovery partition does is it reformats the windows partition and restores it to factory defaults also i doubt your average joe will want to know what you had onthe laptop, also if you have recovery cd's or dvd's most of the time if you lost the recovery partition they will remake the recovery partition, so really i doubt you have anything to worry about if you just sell to someone just looking for a new laptop for office or email stuff

You could slave the drive into another machine and write 0's to the partition that you wish to erase.

You could also do a factory restore as mentioned above, then use a Windows based program like Eraser to overwrite the empty space and cluster tips.

Also, you may be able to find software from the drive's manufaturer to accomplish what you ask.

Slave the hard drive to another computer like don256us said and then download these tools from this website. http://hddguru.com/ I have another program that I can't find at the moment that writes zeros to the hard drive and that is also a very effective way to wipe out your drive.

Pwoah, lotsa info guys, cheerz.... but wtf is slaving the hdd lol? I dont want to torture it and use it as my slave =D Pleaze tellz me what this is.

Just hook it up via another sata cable to your mother board on a second computer or to the slave portion of your IDE ribbon cable if it's a IDE hard drive. Hook up a power connecter to it and then boot up the system on the second computer. Windows will then recognize your new hard drive. They also make a sata/ide to usb adapter that will allow you to do the same without opening up your case. Just plug it into the hard drive on one end and plug it into a USB port on the PC. Install a drive erase program and tell it to perform it's task on the new hard drive. Just make sure you don't erase the good hardrive by mistake.