clean install El Capitan DVD on a 2009 MacBook Pro Hard drive not showing up.

I am trying to clean install OS X El Capitan onto my A1286 MacBook Pro (2009) that has 10.6.8 currently.

I have El Capitan on a DVD and go through the process of choosing the DVD to boot instead of the hard drive by holding option on startup. El Capitan boots, however after the language selection screen where I am supposed to go into disk utility to erase the previous hard drive, the HDD does not show up, only the El Captain DVD. Additionally in the screen where it says "select the disk where you want to install Mac OS X" again only the DVD appears and no HDD.

I have read you can try to erase using recovery mode but I have tried several times to enter recovery mode on startup and I don't think 10.6.8 has recovery mode.

Is there a way to get el capitan on my MacBook?

Thanks,

a confused mac user.