OK, progress has been made....

1. fsck said both internal drives were OK, but i forced it to run anyway. No
errors
2. re-ran grub-install for the 5th time (?) and still no change....reboot
goes right back to grub.
3. discovered that I could boot into 2.6.26 if I used the initrd-2.6.26.bak
file. So did that. The files have different sizes and dates...
4. I looked at men.lst and found that it was trying to chainload into Grub
2. I couldn't get it to run from the grub menu, but then I booted into
2.6.26 and ran upgrade-from-grub-legacy. Hypothesis: the dist-upgrade was
trying to move to grub 2 and so I had a 1/2 grub 1.98 and 1/2 grub 2
install.....The grub 2 upgrade worked, and now I get my typical grub menu
and I can select which linux version to boot into.
5. Booting 2.6.26 causes a kernel panic, but I suspect that is caused by the
bad initrd-2.6.26 file. I seached Debian to find that file, but I could not.
What package do I need to re-install to re-create the initrd-2.6.26? Or the
latest kernel for squeeze is OK, too.
6. Fixed mysql problem. It seems during the dist-upgrade, mysql-server 5.0
was removed, but not the client. So I reinstalled mysql for squeeze, and
aptitude removed the 5.0 client and installed the 5.1 server/client/common
and now it works just fine. All dbs and tables are intact.
7. Fixed some of the X problems - there were some font dirs missing, so
mkfontdir removed those errors. But still no X yet. The error from gdm is:
error inserting i915
(/lib/modules/2.6.21-2-686/kernel/drivers/char/drm/i915.ko) unknown symbols
in module or unknown parameter.

I suspect that my X problem may go away if I reinstall kernel to 2.6.26, or
later. I think something happened in the dsit-upgrade. So, how do I
reinstall the kernel, or upgrade to a newer one?

Thanks!

Mark

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 9:21 AM, Kevin Fries <kfries6@gmail.com> wrote:

>  On 03/29/2011 09:54 AM, Mark Phillips wrote:
>
> On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 8:35 AM, Kevin Fries <kfries6@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On 03/28/2011 06:01 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
>>
>
>
>> It does say that this disk has probably been around for a while, and is
>> likely the older drive that would use hda instead of sda.  But at the end of
>> the day, its just a label that does not mean anything.
>>
>
> Knoppix called the drives sda. My original menu.lst called the drives hda.
> It is an older system, so I am sticking with hda for now.
>
>
> Yea, that is part of the confusion.  Just FYI.  Historically, HDA was IDE
> based systems.  SDA was SCSI based systems.  However, in modern days, these
> lines have been blurred, badly.  Anything plugged into the USB bus is run
> through the SCSI sub-systems, and therefore get labeled as SCSI.  Ditto that
> for compact flash or SD cards.  Some distros, like Knoppix, for
> simplification, run everything through the SCSI subsystem.  Therefore,
> Knoppix will generally call EVERYTHING sda.  Knoppix is not unique, but not
> the norm either.  But most importantly, you can not rely how one version of
> linux labels the drives, as to how another version of linux will.
>
> Kevin
>
>