Problem Erasing Drive

I am attempting to erase the drive in my old eMac (which was acting up). The superdrive (in my eMac) has been useless for a while, so I have it booted in target mode hooked up to my macbook. I'm using Disk Utilities on my Macbook to erase the boot drive from my eMac, without added security (zero-out, 7x or 35 x zero-out data), just a normal disc erase & format to mac os extended (journaled). After 1 & 1/2 hrs Disk Utilities is still barely at 1/2 cm of blue line, at the partitioning phase of the erase. I don't want to force quit Disk Utilities during this process & toast the HDD. Is it normal that erasing a drive via target mode is this long? I 've googled this & all I find is "how-to" instructions for erasing via T-mode, but nothing mentioning super-long erase time...

Anybody? (Thanks in advance )

No, that is definitely not normal. It suggests to me that the drive in your eMac is problematic and might be getting ready to fail. Kill the process and try to start over. If it crawls again, give up and consider replacing the hard drive. (You can't hurt it by stopping the process.)

Regards.

Thanks chsag,
unfortunately you were right & there's a fatal error on the drive so I guess i'll replace it.

Thanks 4 the info ( :