Using used drive want to delete old windows safely

[john68x]

A family member gave me 2 used hard drive and a used ssd drive to install in my sons computer. It was to be a beginning lesson in how to build computers. So we put the drives in they are installed. And he taught me how to set them up and all that as lettered drives though i did not do that yet and he was going to help me delete things off of them like each has windows on them but i don't want or need that i just want them for storage and there is also family photos and other things on there that we do want to keep.. so i don't want to just format them...before he could work with me on all that he passed away.. one has win 10 one has win xp maybe 2 of them do..or maybe one has win 7 or 8

what do i delete to take windows off of each drive safely? is it one top folder or is it more complicated?

thanks for any help with this

 

[jay32267]

What I would do is I would connect them to a working PC. I would get everything off of them that I wanted. Then I would partition and format them.