Hi, The problem has been resolved now. Had mostly to do with me rather than GRUB.
My first bad: when configuring menu.lst to redirect grub to the serial console, I had used the settings: serial --unit=0 --speed=9600 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1 terminal serial This last setting meant that grub no longer redirected to the VGA console. The problem resulted from an evil collusion of two factors: * For some reason, owing either to lunar misalignment or loose cabling, my serial console failed to relay grub messages to my console terminal and that led me to conclude that the machine was dead. I even forgot to reset the setting to 'terminal serial console' while troubleshooting the problem, which meant that I couldn't see grub messages when I connected the desktop to a regular keyboard/monitor for more control. This possibly kept me from proceeding beyond "Grub loading, please wait...". * Something went wacko with my boot entry for vmlinuz-2.6.20-15-generic in the sense that the boot option root=UUID... is no longer meaningful to grub. The boot won't happen with root=UUID... even now. I've verified that the value of deviceID is correct. Oh well, I've changed it to read root=/dev/sda2 Things are back to normal now, i.e. back to my old kernel panic with the new kernel. That is familiar territory. kernel panics are friends. Thanks for helping Steve, and to everyone who took the time to read my posts. regards, rohit.
