Reformating your drive varies with different specs. take for example, typical, A 80GB hard drive with 1GB RAM takes about 4-5h to reformat. The bigger the hard disk, the longer it takes.The lesser the RAM and processer speed, the longer it takes.In your case, i suppose ur RAM or processer speed is low...Most ppl have this problem.f you have a huge hard drive and an extremely sluggish system, it might be feasible for the format operation to take this long, but I don't believe this to be the case. I might recommend you start the format process over again and see if it takes as long. tau_zeppelin. John · 8 years ago.