If these tools come in iso format, burn them to cd. Turn the PC off (switch at the back!), then make sure only the bad drive is connected to the mainboard. Without a physical connection it is impossible for this software to mess up your other drives and their content. Set the BIOS to boot from CD and (re)boot your system.

Follow the instructions from the tool, wait until it is finished and turn machine off (switch at the back!). Connect all drives again and boot your system (without the boot cd of course) and Windows should recognize a clean/pristine drive.
Use drive management console to partition and format the drive.

And tadaaa, cranioscopical is a happy camper again  :)

I have a software raid....but on linux.  Because of power failures here that the UPS is unable to catch, that system crashes. Sometimes it crashes so badly that it has to 'rebuild' the data. The problem is that it can easily take two/three days (as in 48/72 hours!) to rebuild 1 TByte. The machine is in all this time inaccessible.

The setup is 4 250GB SATA2 harddisks (maxtor), 2GB RAM, OpenSuse 10.1 server, Athlon64 3400+, Asus K8N-E Deluxe motherboard. In it 4 years of service it has crashed like this more times than there are fingers on both of my hands.

Given the same choice today, I would go for hardware raid solution. In the end it is cheaper and a whole lot less hassle. Likely you will not encounter as much power failures as I do. Even if the rebuilding takes half the time under windows, I still would advise against going for a software raid. They sound nice in theory, but that is it.