Have some old PC's that I don't have the password for, need away to wipe the hardrive.

[grass]

hey, I was given some old PC's that were just going to be thrown out, some of them have passwords some dont, my question is, could I connect there hard drives to another pc that i have the password for, then use that pc to wipe the hard drive i just plugged in, then reformat it plug it back into the old pc then instal windows on it?

 

what program would i use

and would it work 

 

thank you for any help!

[Electronics Wizardy]

You could just reinstall windows on the drive. If you want to do a full wipe, just do a diskpart clean all before starting the installer.

[An0maly_76]

39 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

You could just reinstall windows on the drive. If you want to do a full wipe, just do a diskpart clean all before starting the installer.

Perhaps OP is referring to a BIOS password?... But then would still have that problem after swapping to another machine and back again... \m/

 

And yes, those hard drives should be fine to connect to any compatible interface in another machine. IDE / PATA are pretty much all the same, but do not interchange with SATA, which are pretty much the same.

Edited August 6, 2022 by An0maly_76
Revised, more info