Formatting for 12 hours, only at 23%

[Mitternacht]

I'm working on a guy's computer from work, and I backed up his files and wiped the hard drive out. I start formatting it, and like the title says, it's taking a long time. The proc is 3.2Ghz, and theres 512MB RAM, so the computer is not slow. Also, the hdd is 120gb.

Is the hard drive living its final hours?

[Lord Ned]

Well, 12 hours isn't normal. Did you do a quick format, or just normal format? Quick takes around 10-20 minutes, and i've seen normal got to 3 hours.

But damn, 12 hours for 23%? Somethings up there. Run chkdisk if you can.

[Mitternacht]

I ran chkdsk 3 days ago. it took about 6 hours to do it. It said it was ok. And no, i didn't pick the quick format option.

[Mitternacht]

UPDATE!

It just hit 24%. That's right, 24%. -_-

[Spawn-Inc]

i think you need a new harddrive...

[rendermandan]

are you doing a "low level format" or writing all 0's to every sector? that can take a while but it does seem excessive!

[doug91]

Is the hard drive making any excessive noise? A clicking, loud scratching, or loud vibration?
Could have some really corrupted sectors, like if you live next to a radio station but I doubt that.

Just in case you didn't know, its a bad idea to turn the computer off in the middle of a format.

[J-Roc]

go to the mfg website and download the diagnostic tools

[CorsePerVita]

That's not right.....

[a.Bird]

Were there any symptoms of harddrive degredation before you formatted? Maybe the harddrive is the reason you're working on the computer for him to begin with?