[newbie] Reinstall of 7.1 stalls

[Dennis Myers]

I'm reinstalling Linux due to stupidity. Now however, the installation
stalls at "formatting hda1" it has already formated the other
partitions. Hda1 is the / partition and so far it has been sitting there
for an hour doing a 5-10 second blink on the HD light. Any suggestions?
What is the command to do a clean wipe of the hard drive? Oh, yes I have
tried rescue disk and other configurations of partitions. Nothing seems
to work. A little help here! I'm seriously frustrated.  Dennis