RH-9 boot hangs from floppy bootdisk

[Shash Chatterjee <sasvata@badfw.org>]

Hi,

I have just installed RH-9 from ISO images I downloaded yesterday.
This system used to run RH-7.3 until this morning. The RH install CD ran 
and installed just fine, and I created a boot disk on floppy.  I 
installed GRUB on the first partition of my RH drive, but not on the MBR.

I have 2 hard-drives, with Win-XP Pro on the first one (C:, /dev/hda) 
and RH (D:, /dev/hdb) on the second.  I also have a DVD-ROM (E:, 
/dev/hdc) and a CD-RW drive (F: /dev/hdd).

When booting from floppy, it loads the kernel/ramdisk from floppy, then 
recognizes the HW and then hangs with the following message (at the 
bottom).  Hitting any key causes a single "keyboard: unknown keysequence 
0e .." and then I have to hard-reset to recover.

Any help would be most appreciated.  Here's the console output:
.....
PIIX4: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:07.1
PIIX4: chipset revision 1
PIIX4: not 100% native mode, will probe irqs later
	ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007, BIOS settings: hda:dma, hdb:dma
	ide1: BM-DMA at oxf008-0xf00f, BIOS settings: hdc:dma, hdd:dma
HPT370: IDE controller at PCI slot 00:0e.1
HPT370: chipset revision 3
HPT370: not 100% native mode, will probe irqs later
	ide2: BM-DMA at 0xb400-0xb407, BIOS settings: hde:pio, hdf:pio
	ide3: BM-DMA at oxb408-0xb40f, BIOS settings: hdg:pio, hdh:pio
hda: IC35L080AWA07-0, ATA disk drive
hdb: WDC WD200EB-00BHF0, ATA disk drive
blk: queue c03c9f40, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0cffffffff)
blk: queue c03c9084, I/O limit 4095Mb (mask 0cffffffff)
hdc: CREATIVEDVD1240E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
hdd: YAMAHA CRW2200E, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
<hangs right here>

Thanks,
Shash