Earsing a new external hard drive

[Dude]

i have recently bought an 120 g external hard drive and i have this problem.
when i inserted it into my mac and went on to erase it to give a partition it stuck there - i think. i say i think because i don't know how much time this process normally takes. its been up for an hour now and it stills setting up partition map. is this normal? shall i shut the stupid mac down? throw it out the window?
i cant force quit it - it wont give that option.
i m running mac os x 10.2.8 on a powerbook g4. with a hinge broken:P

[Cory]

unless you are doing a zero all data format, then it should only take a few seconds...

[mattbeals]

Yeah, this was a 5 minute operation on my PowerBook G4 once I had the drives swapped.

[Dude]

thanks for your replies guys!
There was an extra power cable because in case usb power wasnt enough for the drive. so after we discovered that :P it was ok.