Whoa, whoa, guys, wake up here.
You cannot use NTFS under Me by default. Perhaps you could get hacked-up drivers from somewhere, but seems a bad idea. NTFS is for NTx, hence the 'NT' in it
PTS, I don't know what you did to make it take that long.
Partitioning and formatting my new 160GB drive entirely, in NTFS, took about ten minutes or something, on an AMD XP 2400+.