Drive use between MAcs and PCs

Hello,
I hope this is the right place for this query... I would like to extract a hard drive from a Sony laptop that is one year old (just out of warrantee and Sony won't fix it!) and hook it up to my MACBook or MAC Pro to delete data or reformat to destroy sensitive data before giving it to some student who think they can fix the thing... Can I access the data with my MAC and reformat it to whatever format (MAC or other does not matter as long as the data is gone)?
Thanks for help with this... Floor
P.S. I tried to access USB drives with my work Windows based laptop and failed (could not see it in the Explorer while I could eject it - failing to would bring up the message of possible data corruption.. Is that normal? Or are these drives interchangeable with the latest windows PCs (my work laptop uses Windows 2000, yes I know Barney Flintstone probably owned it one day).

If the drive is formatted Windows NT, your Mac will be able to read the files on the drive, but you will not be able to change the files in any way, including dragging them to the trash. To delete the files, reformat the drive using Disk Utility. Be sure to click on the security options button and select "Zero Out Data." Otherwise, someone will still be able to recover your data from the drive.

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