i downloaded a tool once, cant remember where i got it from, but it sets certain areas of your hard disk to 0, i dont know if this is the low-level format people are referring to.
usually everything can be fixed with a windows 98 startup bootdisk which u can d/l from aoa files.. use fdisk to wipe the partitions, reset, format the whole disk, reset, insert win2k installation cd, and reformat to ntfs if you so wish
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