Hi all,
I have tried creating a linux ext2 partition on an external USB hard drive using Partition Magic so that I could install linux on the drive.
The problem: Partition Magic now displays the partition format as BAD and when I try to use it to revert to FAT32 format, it tells me "error #4; Too few arguments .... Bad MBR"
I want to know whether this bad MBR on the hard disk can be fixed and how? Or is the hard disk forfeited?
Thank you for answering .

I don't know about Partition Magic, but if you have a running linux system you should be able to just plug the drive in and have it picked up by the usb-storage driver as /dev/sda (or similar). Then you can partition with fdisk and set up a filesystem.

Plug in the (running) drive and check end of output of 'dmesg' command to see if disk is detected.

If you don't yet have linux installed anywhere you could do a similar thing with a live CD.

It's hard to believe there is any permanent damage to the disk.

Thank you for replying. I was creating a linux ext2 partition on the external USB hard disk when the problem started. Partition Magic is a Windows program that enables you to create such partitions from a windows environment.
Now Partition Magic is unable to reformat the hard disk to any format specified (including linux ext2) because it constantly reports that the Master Boot Record(MBR) of the hard disk is bad. Now the existing linux ext2 format on the disk is also not working properly. My main problem is how to have the MBR fixed so that maybe I can do the reformatting.
Thanks.

If you google for 'bad mbr' there is lots of advice e.g.

http://www.pcformat.co.uk/tips/defau...bsectionid=461

According to this 'fdisk /mbr' is what you need.