Hi Dennis,

>  Tried that, doesn't seem to make any difference. Weird, my 6GB HDD gets
>formatted in a matter of seconds...

I can't make any sense of it either, all I could try was taking some output 
from the console during install....

This is your original 1.6.1 restore cd...

  ------------------------------------------------
   Setting up /var...
  ------------------------------------------------

/dev/wd0f:      4195296 sectors in 4162 cylinders of 16 tracks, 63 sectors
         2048.5MB in 13 cyl groups (330 c/g, 162.42MB/g, 19968 i/g)
super-block backups (for fsck -b #) at:
       32,  332736,  665440,  998144, 1330848, 1663552, 1996256, 2328960,
  2661664, 2994368, 3327072, 3659776, 3992480,


...and this is from the 3.99 cd...

------------------------------------------------
   Disk Setup: Format /var
  ------------------------------------------------

/dev/wd0f: 2048.5MB (4195296 sectors) block size 16384, fragment size 2048
         using 12 cylinder groups of 170.72MB, 10926 blks, 21504 inodes.
super-block backups (for fsck_ffs -b #) at:
32,
349664,
699296,
1048928,
1398560,
1748192,
2097824,
2447456,
2797088,

...which seems to take twice as long.

Sorry I couldn't be more help here,
Kind Regards,
Pete.