Initializing SATA drive, time consuming?

[waltherone]

I've been using PATA, even in my gaming machine, forever now because I've been reusing a lot of drives with stuff already on them. I just put a 250gb WD SATAII drive (only running SATA I due to the board) in my sister's computer and it is at the "initializing" stage in windows right now, does this normally take a while? I'ts been going for about 5 minutes now, the cursor is an hourglass so I can't click anything, and the hard drive light is steadily on. Just wanted to know if it's supposed to take this long or if something is wrong, I feel like a noob again

 

[unhappy_mage]

5 minutes doesn't sounds unusually long. What are you using to initialize the drive?

 

[waltherone]

Got the problem, did a little research, SATA 1 & 2 ports are always unstable when the HTT is above 240mhz, sister's machine is running at 266mhz htt, so that was it Put it on port 3 and it works fine.

FWIW, I was initializing in the Administrative tools/computer management/storage/disk managment.