Stalin Update: Failure last night led me to take drastic action this morning - I removed both drives and reset the SCSI ID jumpers to swap them. Now the 9gb will be sda and the 2gb will be sdb, allowing me to put the / partition on the larger and active (first) disk. Is this what is required for a Linux install? These two drives ran Win98 for years without complaint, but I cannot seem to get linux to work on them at all! This is what is preventing linux from becoming a mainstream OS - the unreasonable finicky behavior it displays from time to time.

I used the 2940 controller bios to verify both drives, and tonight I repartition/reformat both drives in DOS, then let Red Hat do its magic. Hopefully this time it will install and work flawlessly.