Secure Erase Before Selling

I'm getting ready to sell my mid 2008 macbook, I've researched & obsessed over what to do to prepare my MB. I decided to reformat the hard drive using the 2 disc that came with the MB. I put the disk in, got to disk utilities, selected the internal HD, went to erase tab, kept it at Mac OS Extended (journaled), renamed it, and chose 7 pass security erase under security options. I confirmed the erase (which took several times). It's been about 45 minutes and it still says "Preparing to securely remove data from disk." I know the 7 pass is going to take awhile, but is this normal? The drive has 111 GB.