changing harddrive

[bob22164]

hi, everyone
i'm selling a computer (hp pavilion 740 uk) and don't want leave any personal details on the hard drive. i fought about replacing the hard drive with a new one, but i wondered if i can clean my hard drive which will totally delete everything on the hard drive, as i know just formatting the hard drive still leaves traces of things that were on my hard drive. my hardrive is 60gb but has a partition which windows xp in stored. if i did replace the hard drive how would i reinstall windows because when i bought the computer the installation disc was extra
thanks

 

[Geoff]

If you reformated your hard drive, it would be practically impossible for a normal user. Only an expert on data recovery would be able to recover some data. I'd say that its safe to just reformat, since buying a new hard drive is expensive.