Wipe HDD Low Risk

[Dracstaxi]

My neighbor isn't very technically savvy. She wanted to dispose of her old HDDs so I took them off her hands and told her I'd securely wipe them (I understand the different standards of cleaning drives). How should I wipe these drives without exposing my own computer to potential malware/viruses? Is there a micro OS I could load onto a flash drive and boot into before connecting the drives to my machine? Can the bios do this securely?

[Electronics Wizardy]

dban. Os made for exactly this purpose. Just boot the os and select the drives you wan tto wipe.

 

But you can normally just format them in windows if you want to reuse them. Risk of malware is very low.

[BondiBlue]

Are you intending to reuse these drives? If so, then use something like DBAN to wipe them securely. If not, just open them up and destroy the platters.