[Lincs] Fscking Problems

[MD]

OK, I just bought a shiny new 120GB HD on which I plan to put a nice
clean, stable install of Debian Woody.

Unfortunately, after three installation attempts it seems to get stuck
on the bad block scan when initialising/formatting following the
partitioning process, which I'm told suggests that there are more bad
blocks than usual, and therefore the harddrive has to mess about
marking them and adding their locations to the bad block inode... or
something. :)

I've put the new HD into my fully operational linux box, and I started
off a bad block scan with the command 'fsck -c /dev/hdb'. The
filesystems in question are ext2, so it'll be using e2fsck to do this.

The problem now is that the machine has become unresponsive, and has
stayed that way for nearly 3 hours now. I can switch to different
consoles, but I can't log into any that aren't already logged in (it
just doesn't do anything after I put in my username & passwd) and I
get a similar response when I try to SSH in. The machine is still
responding to pings though.

My linux mentor from uni tells me that bad block scans can take a very
long time, and of course I am loathed to force a reboot.

Does anyone have any advice? 

-- 
Thanks,
-Matt Dancer <barodato at gmail dot com>