some time ago, a laptop broke down. I managed to save the ram, the processor and the hard drive, that disk had a Window$ 10 installed and is encrypted by BIOS. Instead of throwing it, I would like to format it and put a casing to be able to use it as an external disk.
How could I do this? Thanks.
Assuming you have a computer that runs Ubuntu or an Ubuntu community flavour,
If you wipe the first mibibyte, overwrite it with zeros, the data on the [rest of] the drive does not make any difference, and you can use any tool for this purpose.
You can wipe the first mibibyte in a safe way with mkusb.
After that you can [install and] use gparted or some command line tools to create the partition table with partitions and file systems that you want. It might even work without wiping the first mibibyte (depending of on the data in that part of the drive).
Links:
If it is a Self-encrypting-drive, you might look in the info provided by the Drive Trust Alliance.