Very slow installation of RHEL5 on Workstation

For some reason it's taking over 30 minutes to install RHEL5 in VMware Workstation 7.1 (in comparison it only took 10 minutes to install RHEL5 in VirtualBox on my laptop with much lower specs). Any ideas? (storing the VM on my 1.5 TB drive that I have dedicated for VMs)
UPDATE: It's taking over an hour now.
I don't have a slow machine at all for my desktop:
Phenom II 955 quad
8 GB of RAM
1 TB WD EADS (system drive)
1.5 TB WD EARS (for VMs)
UPDATE: It's taking over an hour now.
I don't have a slow machine at all for my desktop:
Phenom II 955 quad
8 GB of RAM
1 TB WD EADS (system drive)
1.5 TB WD EARS (for VMs)
Comments
I don't know if it's the EARS drive 4k sector size causing issues, when I formatted it I just let Windows choose and under System Information it shows up as 512 bytes/sector (my preformatted external WD EARS drive also shows up as 512 bytes/sector but have not had any issues with it.)
UPDATE:Well I ran the WD align too and it said everything is ok, so I don't know what the issue is.
2nd UPDATE: I have tried installing RHEL5 on my external HDD (which is also an EARS drive) and I get the same crawling speed. I've installed an XP VM and it installed relatively quickly, within 15 minutes so I guess it's just a case of RHEL5 hating to be installed on a EARS drive. I'll just have to perform the VM installation on my system drive and just copy it over.
MCSA 2003, LFCS, LFCE (expired), VCP6-DCV
How would I go about creating an aligned partition? I thought that the type of physical disk used would not be an issue, but I might be just better off to return the EARS drive and get a normal sector size EADS drive (which are becoming hard to find.)
MCSA 2003, LFCS, LFCE (expired), VCP6-DCV
MCSA 2003, LFCS, LFCE (expired), VCP6-DCV
MCSA 2003, LFCS, LFCE (expired), VCP6-DCV
MCSA 2003, LFCS, LFCE (expired), VCP6-DCV