Hey there again, xray-wmn!
The only thing that I can suggest you is our WD's Data LifeGuard Diagnostic tool for Windows. It can help you determine the health and SMART status of the drive by running the quick and extended tests, and let you know if there are any bad sectors or other SMART attributes that you should be concerned about.
However, it also has the feature of WRITING ZEROS (a.ka. low-level format). Doing the full erase will get the HDD back to how it was when you bought it, which means: NO DATA and NO FORMAT. Afterwards, you'd still need to re-initialize it and format it in order to be able to use it.
Here is a link to the WD software:
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=rNcFt5
Here's the tutorial on how to perform the low-level formatting with it:
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=lAEn9l
Once this is completed, you can use these two links to initialize & format:
How to initialize a drive:
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=VLoLN9
How to partition & format an HDD:
http://products.wdc.com/support/kb.ashx?id=nz1A3A
Hope this helps you. Keep me posted!
SuperSoph_WD