i have a 20gig maxtor hard dive as master and a 40g samsung as slave when redhat boots it does a partition check and it stalls out forever. it reads the partition info off the maxtor but it freezes when it gets to the samsung. if i disconnect the power form the samsung drive it boots perfectly

I had a similar problem with RH8, and aparently, we're not the only ones. One work-around is to boot with the option "linux ide=nodma" on your bootloader, this should allow it to boot without much trouble.

thanks this has been driving me nuts