Slack 10.2 Install

I've gotten my SlackWare 10.2 in the mail. I started the install and got the partitions set. Linux Swap is /dev/hdc1. The ext3 file system is /dev/hdc2. When I activated this partition in the setup, it gave the option to format the drive, format it slowly checking for bad blocks, or leave it be. Well, I chose format (slowly) and that was about 32 hours and 30 minutes ago. The hard drive light is still going nuts and I can still hear the hard drive activity. It's being installed on a Dell Inspiron 5100. I've formatted a thousand drives or more in my life (though none on Linux)and I would get frustrated if it took an hour. The machine is still responsive - I can press "Enter" and the screen moves down a line - and the cursor is still blinking in the bottom left.

I talked to an old Unix admin who said that he's seen drives take up to 72 hours to format via the slow version, but that was a big server hard drive on using RAID. This is just a 30gb IDE drive. I picked the least inode density - only 1 per 4096 bytes. (instead of the 1 per 1024)

Thoughts? Ideas? Anything? I'd really like to get on with my install - but I'm not sure how a hard powerdown would hurt this drive/install.

Thanks
-K