i have reformatted the hard drives and am running an install from the original cd that came with our dell. seems to be stuck at "install will complete in 33 minutes"...it has been there for over an hour and never gets to the point of asking for the product red key or any of the other install questions.
thanks,
julie
ps. i am researching the problem from our mac...but the computer is a dell desktop.

julie laspesa, January 2008

I happened to me too, what i did was eject the install disk and closed it again and it started working again, hope this works for you too.

Glen, March 2008

I had this issue after finding out I had a worm attack the registry on my hard drive. I had to put the hard drive in a case and use a program called "kill disk" (free download) to completely wipe the disc. The normal reformatting procedure merely writes over top of whatever is there rather than erase the disc and start new.
try that ...

http://www.killdisk.com/downloadfree.htm

Jason, January 2008