I have setup a dual boot with Windows xp pro and redhat 9; I am using the grub bootloader. Ihave two hard disk drives a western digital 32 gig (redhat drive) and a maxtor 80 gig (windows XP NTFS).

My question is this; after i installed the redhat and grub boot loader my windows drive seems to run very slow. The boot takes about twice as long, and system performance in particular video and audio files a very sluggish playing now. should this be the case?

I don't think it is my computer itself; it is a 2.4GHz pentium with 512mb of ram.

any suggestions?

I guess you had Windows partitions on the Linux disk earlier, right? Which one is primary? If it's Windows one, remove the Linux disk for a moment, boot Windows (so it will remove the second one from its profiles) and then add the disk again.

if i remove the linux drive the wdc 30 gig the computer will not boot on the maxtor windows drive.

also if i go to my computer i do not see second harddrive listed in there. When i installed RH i had it format the drive completly.

You formatted the drive, but it can be still in Windows hardware profiles. Open hardware profiles and try to search the 30GB drive. If it's here, remove it from the profile/choose an option not to use it or something similar (I don't use Windows, so I can't give you details).