I was debating just now burning a DBAN disk just to use the ancient HP I recovered to wipe old IDE hard disks.

That idea broke down when when I realized that the ribbon connector was actual floppy and there was no IDE connector.

It broke down further when I tested the optical drive with another disk to see if I could stubbornly use it with a USB IDE adapter. The drive didn't seem to spin up and I'm not wasting my time burning a drive when I have other options.

I finally grabbed a Linux Mint live USB and another computer. I'm supposedly running shred on the drive, but I forgot to include output so I'll just know when I get back in to work Monday. Top does say shred is using processor cycles, so I guess it's fine.