I successfully installed Redhat linux 9 but upon booting it kept freezing when it got the point of detecting the drives. I re-installed linux several times and each time tried different things. Finally, the problem goes away when I disconnect every other drive except floppy and the hard drive that has linux on it hdb2. Yes, no primary hard drive, cd-roms disconnected from IDE cable.
Note: Never had problems with installation only booting.

Could this problem be caused by linux being on a primary slave drive?
Hard drive is a Maxtor 8G. Is this some kind of ATA/EIDE whatever conflict? BIOS? I'm hoping other have similar issue and can help.

Remove the primary drive references from /etc/fstab (/dev/hda~) and try booting again.
Then check mounting them manually or running kudzu again to detect them.

You might need to map the drives differently in the grub.conf file. Do you have the BIOS set to boot from hdb?

Can you post your grub.conf file?