I'm installing ubuntu on my external hard drive and when it's formatting the partition, it just hangs on 33%. Is this normal? It's 390GB HD btw.
People in IRC (irc.freenode.net, #ubuntu) just told me to leave it overnight. Should this work?

EDIT: Problem resolved. Worked after running a few hours.

what are your system specs? when i try to install Ubuntu it likes to freeze at 15% (reading file systems), so instead I installed XUbuntu, which is the low-resource version, because it uses XFCE instead of Gnome. Runs like a charm, but if you've got a stiffy for Gnome, you could try leaving it on overnight, although if it doesn't install you'll have wasted an entire night.

You could try running the "sudo gparted" command from the livecd's terminal and formatting from there. (You'll need a root partition in ext3, and a swap partition 2x your ram size.)

I don't remember if Ubuntu lets you install on a blank partition without formatting though.

Formatting takes less than a minute for me usually.

I got it to install. It just took a few hours to get over the hang. Weird. :P