How can I erase the the hard disk as I am returning it to the store?

I have an iMac running OS X Lion and I'm returning it to the store I purchased it from because it's faulty. So I need to erase everything securely.
I used Disk utility to erase the free space securely. But when I click on the HDD  it doesn't allow me to erase.
Please help.  Many thanks

I run an older Mac and have no hands-on experience with newer systems.  Lion and newer use two partitions on a drive.  One is a recovery partition which contains basic system utilities.  It used to be if your system went bad you inserted a disc (DVD or CD) with basic utilities which let you boot your computer to a base system to give you access to utiltiies and to install a full system.  When Apple did away with DVDs for Lion+ it went to keeping a separate partition on the hard drive for storing these things unless your drive is so damaged it can't even read that and it needs to boot from the Internet.
About OSX Recovery - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718 >  Internet Recovery - using the Internet to start when recovery disk partition not available.
As far as I know there shouldn't be anything personal in the recovery partition since it stores the base system and utilities that used to be stored on discs (optical disc vs. hard drive disk) but there may be some way to force it to wipe the whole drive through Internet recovery.

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