I am reformatting my hard drive so I can reinstall WinXP after a damaging virus attack.  I successfully followed the refomat/reinstall procedure until I got to the step where you type in "F" to format the selected partition.  The message "Setup is formatting.....20%" has been on the screen for two hours.  I've reformatted before and never had this happen.

 

BTW, I'm sure I selected the correct partition as I had a Dell rep on chat at the time.

 

Dimension 8200

40GB hard drive

Only monitor, keyboard and mouse are attached to the computer.

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks.