After the "IBM Deathstar" fiasco, they eventually sold out that side of the business to:
www.hgst.com - Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm - The "Drive Fitness" tool is probably what you need.
It is not generally possible to actually "low level" format an IDE, as the factory formatting is not accessible to user programs - the most that can normally be done is a zero-fill, and a re-analyze of any bad sectors, in some cases revectoring them to spare sectors - not sure that it's implemented yet on these.