I've got an old laptop hardrive I want to use as an extra one in my desktop

[theguy1991]

The laptop died a few years ago but I used a USB 2.0 sata connector thing to get some files off of it onto my desktop. I want to just wipe the hard drive. Can I do this by just formatting it? (Right click, format) Also when I connected the laptop hard drive, it shows 4 different drives: Local Disk, HP TOOLS, SYSTEM, and RECOVERY.

 

[USAFRet]

How are you connecting this drive? Internally via a SATA cable?

Disk Management
Select each partition
Delete
Format the resulting large space
Give it a drive letter
Done.

 

[Entomber]

those extra partitions are created by HP & Windows for various purposes, if you're formatting the drive you should delete the partitions, extend the space, and format away in Disk Management.

You should be able to do this either using SATA or USB