Formatting external hard drive

[tschrhrt]

I recently bought a 320 gb external hardrive for my dell inspiron 640m notebook. When i plug it in i have to format it to work, so i did. Anyways its been formating for about 4 hours now and is maybe 5% done. Is this normal to take this long, at the pace its going at right now its gunna take days before its done.

 

[Chuck_Fu]

I recently bought a 320 gb external hardrive for my dell inspiron 640m notebook. When i plug it in i have to format it to work, so i did. Anyways its been formating for about 4 hours now and is maybe 5% done. Is this normal to take this long, at the pace its going at right now its gunna take days before its done.

That is taking awhile I would think it would be done by now even though larger harddrives take longer to format. Do you have it formatting and checking for bad sectors if you do that might make it take longer but it should have been done in 4 hours.