Me too.
So, a Google search for "Hard Drive low level format tool Windows 8.1" took me here and I downloaded the tool and even paid for the upgrade which more than doubled the speed. It seems to be working just fine, and reasonably quickly. I figure the whole job should be done in, hmmm, let's see... 1,800,000 megabytes @ 115 MB/sec = 15,652 seconds, or about four hours and twenty minutes.

All in all, much easier (for me, anyway, probably not for you!) than trying to set up a Linux boot media and mis-typing the command line parameters.

In about four hours, I'll let you know how things turned out.

tanstaafl.