Just a couple questions about installing a new hdd.  Can someone tell me what happens, when a new/bare hdd is installed and has to be 'initialized' in Disk Management?   Also when I format a drive/partition with Disk Management tools it can take 40 minutes (for a 120GB drive by my experience), but if I format with a program like Partition Magic it takes maybe only one minute, what's up with that? 

As many (old) techs of my age, I still DOS Partition and format every new drive that I get.
That writes and reads every sector on the HD's surface.  Any bad blocks or blocks that cannot reliably hold data, will be blocked out and put into a Bad-Blocks list, where they will never be used.
Oh yes, it takes a while, but it's also the most reliable format you'll ever get.  
It pays dividends if you're going to trust that drive to your OS and data.
All new drives have some Bad Blocks on them, but those are normally  blocked out during the Low Level Format at the Factory.

I've recovered several IDE drives this year, by running a Low Level Format routine on them, which scans every sector and blocks out the bad ones.
So far, I don't have a LLF program that runs on a SATA HD.

If I'm going to, for instance, test Windows 7 on that drive, I then reformat it in Windows as an NTFS partition.  Win Vista and 7 won't load on a FAT-32 formatted partition.