[2y4life]

I'm selling my laptop and there are a few people interested in it. The thing is, I no longer have the recovery disks for Windows XP nor do I have my Microsoft Office 2007 CD or the Adobe Photoshop CS3 CD. I had them for a while and lost them when I moved to college. The potential buyers are interested in my laptop because I have Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 as well as Adobe Photoshop CS3. So if I do a complete wipe with DBAN, it will wipe my entire HD clean, correct? Is it possible to wipe certain parts of the hard drive and not others?

Is there a way for me to sell my laptop while keeping Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 and Photoshop on there without compromising my security? I can't reformat or wipe my whole laptop due to missing recovery disks. I know simply deleting everything isn't "safe" but is that enough? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

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Without the disks you can't install anything.
Yet if you want security, you'll have to wipe it.

You may find the computer, if it's relatively recent, has a recovery partition on the hard drive so it may not have come with CDs for it in the first place. Most Compaqs, HPs, Advents and the vast majority of Dells have these recovery partitions as standard. Fire it up and keep pressing F10, F11, CTRL+F11 or CTRL+F10 to see if it does something different.

[Neil Jones]

Without the disks you can't install anything.
Yet if you want security, you'll have to wipe it.

You may find the computer, if it's relatively recent, has a recovery partition on the hard drive so it may not have come with CDs for it in the first place. Most Compaqs, HPs, Advents and the vast majority of Dells have these recovery partitions as standard. Fire it up and keep pressing F10, F11, CTRL+F11 or CTRL+F10 to see if it does something different.