redhat 8 : system hang while booting
 

I have a HP-pavilion 752n at my home which has

Intel Pentium-4 (2.0 Ghz)
1 hdrive (seagate 60GB - with 2 partitions) (IDE)
RAM 512MB
1 CD/RW driver (IDE)
1 DVD-ROM drive (IDE)
HP-pavilion mx70 monitor
Windows XP (home edition).

I have now added another Hard drive (western digital - IDE 120GB) as a slave.
The new drive seems to work fine on windows. (I was able to partition it and make a NTFS filesystem on it). I tried installing Redhat 8 on the newly added drive (I had wiped out the NTFS partition before installing Redhat on this new drive). The installation went thru fine but the linux boot just hangs (in the initial stages itself). The last message displayed on the screen is

blk: queue c03c0004, I/O limit 4095Mb (masj 0xffffffff)

Messages before this seem to suggest that linux was able to probe all the hdrives as well as the CD-RW and DVD-rom drive.

Although I have installed grub as the boot loader, I do not think that is the problem because I tried booting it using the linux loader (from floppy) but it failed at the same point.

There are no visible error messages..

Any clue as to whats going wrong here ?? Any help will be highly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

well... I tried Red Hat 9 but it did not help either. Then on Red Hat 9, I tried booting up with kernel option "apm=off" and that worked. I would think that even with Red Hat 8, with the apm=off option, linux would have booted fine.