System Restore Taking Forever

Hi,

I had issues with Windows as I had a bad HDD. So I retrieved a older system restore to when it was working ok.

I am in windows XP at the moment and clicked the system restore. The it comes up with calender window to what point you want to restore to. I click on the one I want and it goes to the next screen where it says Confirm Restore Point Selection. Down the bottom it has Back, Next and Cancel buttons. I click next and for the last hour my pc has basically been sitting there with the HDD going from time to time. It also says that "System restore may take a few moments to collect info about the selected restore point before shutting down"

I have tried other restore points but same problem.

Before I did this I had to copy the SAM, DEFAULT etc registry files to /system32/config from the repair directory.

Does this process just take SO LONG because its making a lot of changes? Or is there something not working right here.

Please help and many thanks in advance! Thanks.

I also forgot to mention that the next button is still clickable as is the back button. I would of thought if it was actually doing something that it would not be clickable anymore.

UPDATE: It has been 3 hours now and the HDD light seems to be more active. Well on a lot of the time. I got a new Seagate 7200rpm HDD and its very quiet so I dont know its behaviour whether something is happening or not.