Low level formatting isn't done much anymore since it would destroy important data on the drive that is required for the drive to power on.
You probably need to wipe the first couple hundred sectors of the drive. That usually works to remove corrupted boot managers/partition data.
Easy to do from windows.
Download winhex.
http://www.winhex.com/winhex/
Go to tools, open disk, click the drive under physical disk ( not logical )
Click edit, then fill disk sectors
click OK
It will now start filling the drive with 0's starting from the first sector.
Let it run till it reaches sector 1024 then you can cancel it. There is nothing to gained from letting it wipe the whole disk or writing over it multiple times, so save some hard drive wear and tear by canceling once it reaches 1024.
close winhex and try to partition it now.
Seems like a lot of steps, but it only takes a minute to do.