progress of a format?
The word "Formatting" appears with no numeral and the percent sign only prior to the completion of the first percentage amount. So it will, if you let it, show 1% but only after that point has been reached. This took some time in my case (the reason I searched for this discussion) because it is a 3 terabyte external hard disk drive.
cmd utility diskpart has a format option that will show you format progress in percentage.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766465(v=ws.10).aspx