WIN 2000 recovery, how long?

[easyrb]

I started win 2000 recovery it came up examining disk but has been at it for 30-40 minutes, how long will it go before?

 

[Nodsu]

It should be almost instantaneous.. AFAIK in this phase Windows checks your partitions, what filesystems are there and whether Windows is installed anywhere.

Either the hard drive is bad or the partition table/filesystem is messed up.
First test the hard drive with the manufacturer utility.