Guide to reformat and initialize an HD in Disk Management

I have some sheets on doing a reformat for an HD but messed it up.

Fortunately my backup is adequate.

Between the format refresh and then attempting to clone a good boot drive I messed up both.

So I am using a backup HD now with older data.

What happened was (from my search for answer) an active partition or something was created
and then not recognized. I threw up my hands when I saw the error on both.

Now with no alternative I am running a low level format on one of the bad ones to clean
off any bad information and start over. The tool used is HDD Guru Low Level Format tool.

But I know that certain things have to be done in sequence to initialize etc. Also need to know if it's an absolute necessity to do the formatting with Disk Management on the same computer.
For this job on a WD 1 Tb drive I also have a WD Data Life disk in case that is a better solution.

Please point to a guide which will clarify all of the steps. A Simple format and partition for whole volume
is all that is needed-- something I can clone to without errors from my good backup.

I do't know if DataLife has been updated or if a new download would be better if that method is used.

The best free disk manager is Mini tool - https://www.partitionwizard.com/download/pw10-free.exe
You can do with Windows disk management. Right click on Computer - Manage -Storage -Disk management.
Delete all partitions - create new - format

Thanks for answering. I will look at Minitool.
Once the low level was done I had a starting place-- meaning that my guides which
I think came from how to format SSD (haven't got one) with no special
tools and just admin routines in Win 7.

Initialize, then format had me stumped for a bit. Minitool sounds like an effective
utility for someone like me.

Just to add that MiniTool is called Partition Wizard. I had this saved to CD but cannot recall why I didn't grab it.