I have an older Dell Optiplex GX260 running Debian lenny. It has worked for
years as a desktop and a small web server. At one point one of the
integrated IDE disk controller channels died, so I installed a new disk
controller card, a Silicon Image 0680 ATA133 and it worked out of the box
with the two drives for the past 3 months. Last weekend I tried a
dist-upgrade to squeeze. The upgrade had no errors, so I rebooted the
machine, and now all I get is a grub menu.

When the machine boots, the Silicon Magic displays it's banner and
recognizes the two drives installed in the machine (same as before the
upgrade). I then get the message loading grub 1.5, and I then get dumped to
a grub menu. It seems the boot process does not access the Silicon Image
controller, although it did before I upgraded to squeeze. I tried accessing
the drive from the grub prompt, but the disk access light does not seem to
light up - only the cd light.

I tried booting from a Knoppix 4.6.6 CD, and it worked. I am able to browse
the internal hard drives with no problem and read files. So, at least
Knoppix can use the controller card and the hardware is not dead. I noticed
on the upgrade from lenny to squeeze I went from kernel 2.6.21 to 2.6.26.

Any suggestions on how to get the machine to boot again?

Thanks,

Mark