Is is normal to take many hours for a computer to recover after installing 2 new drives?

[EHS]

My original hard drive went bad. I installed 2 large drives (2 TB, each), and used the recovery DVDs, that I originally purchased from HP, to reinstall Windows Vista Ultimate. The first stage, where all the DVDs were used, was completed within an hour or so (there was message indicating that the disk was formatted and Windows Vista was installed, and that the remaining tasks was security updates and other tasks that I had to do later, as expected). Then the system rebooted and now it displays the following message:

o DO NOT turn off your PC during this one-time setup process

o Your PC restarts several times during this setup process

o Messages may pop up onto your screen. Ignore these messages until you are prompted to Restart or Shutdown your PC

At the bottom of the screen it says "Please wait..."

and underneath it there are three moving squares that keep moving to the right (indicating something is working)

This has been going on for at least 8 or 9 hours. There are no reboots, no messages, or anything else is happening. Also there is no light indicating that the hard drive is working.

Is this normal? How long should I expect this to be going on? Is there any way to know if there is really something happening?!

I am assuming that the second drive is being formatted, but I have no way of knowing since there was no information displayed saying anything about that.

Thank you in advance for any hints.

Ezz

[Big_Dave]

You can disconnect the data cable from the second hard drive it to eliminate that possibility. Once your PC is up and running then power off and reconnect the data cable. After you boot up, then go into Disk Management and initialize and format the second hard drive.

What model HP PC are you using?  What model hard drive are you using?

I have heard of installations taking overnight but more than two hours seems abnormal.

[EHS]

Thank you. That was what I intended to do in the first place, but then I decided to take a short cut and install both drives at the same time and just see what happens. In the first couple of hours it looked promising, but after that much investment of time I didn't want to interrupt whatever was happening!  In the past some tasks took a very long time but the end they were accomplished (after I almost gave up!).

Well, I will do it the slow way, which is usually faster!

By the way my PC is HP Pavilion Elite m9000t, and my new disk drives are WD Caviar Black, 2 TB each.

Thank you for replying; I needed the nudge!

[Big_Dave]

Let's hope it works and it doesn't turn out to be the issue of an older motherboard and bios not liking the large capacity hard drives.