Originally Posted by mshulman

Many HP laptops have the recovery built into them, but if its an older laptop it may not.

You'd need to boot with the operating system CD - That should step you through the recovery process.

Any steps you'd want to take to more securely erase the drive should be done prior. Whether its necessary or not really depends on what you had on the drive and who you are selling it to.

There's definetely a risk in not erasing securely if you have any sensitive data on it, but the risk is minimal when you consider the average user wouldn't know how to retrieve it and a format and reinstall is going to permanently destroy a portion of the data as well.