To clarify a few things.
-It was an unformatted SATA drive. I bought the drive and a seperate enclosure to make my own external.
-The DVR will format the drive itself, in fact, it has to, and will reformat any previously PC NTFS formatted drive it sees. It is only suposed to format the drive for a few mins, just enough to recognize the drive. I believe after that it writes the drive raw, or formats its own style on the fly
-I was attempting to use my PC to format the drive as a check to see if the drive was bad, because it was not behaving as it should have with the DVR. The 12 hour 4% completion seems to confirm this for me.
I have XP with SP2. Didn't know there was a limit to partition size, or what it is. Windows Disk Management was letting me create a single parition in its setup for the full drive, I believe. I was selecting the value it provided me with anyways.
I've got some IT guys at work looking at it, hopefully they'll confirm its messed. I also noticed today when removing the drive from the enclose that it appears a little corner plastic foot on the drive has been broken off, so perhaps the drive was dropped sometime during it making, or their OEM quality control is lacking.
