the humorous results:
it was all about this ibm drive we needed to format. we needed to get it to the original state that it was when sent from the manufacturer. we tested it in a couple products and reformatted it in windows because they said it was a window format.
well after a week of going back and forth, we figured out it was shipped with a fat16 format
needless to say, you are right, .. i didn't need a low level format.