external hard drive with a bad partition
 

I have an external hard drive which is connected through usb and I had messed up while reformatting it for linux. Linux does not detect it and neither will windows, partition magic says it has a bad partition, and cannot fix it. Device manager cannot fix it either. what should I do to be able to reformat it if my utilities cannot access it?

You should, at least, be able to reformat the drive with fdisk... or FDISK under DOS if you like. The fact that partition magic can see the drive suggests that SOMETHING knows it's there, hmmm?

excuse me, but how do you know linux cannot see the drive - have you looked in dmesg for eg or just tried to mount it??

my knowledge of linux is very limited but from what I had tried it didn't mount it. nor seem to detect.

And what syntax should I use when using FDISK?

I started playing around with linux and found that the hardware configuration manager (or something like that) detects the drive. But of course I cannot access it.

Hmmm... thought as much!

Let me introduce you to a wonderful thingy called a "man page" :)

In terminal type

and a whole lot of stuff comes up telling you about fdisk. Right at the end it has other commands to try, like (in this case) sfdisk and so on. At the start is the syntax, then a description of the command and what it's supposed to do, and then a detailed description of what all the options are supposed to do. There will also be examples for some of the older and more complex commands.

another thing like "man" is "info" ... it works the same way, and often has extra information organised with html hotlinks etc.

CAVEAT: using fdisk to reformat a disk is trouble, make sure of any command before hitting that final <enter>. However - the worst you can do is repartition your drive... which will erase all data on the drive... which you cannot access anyway. So what the hey...