building and installing a new kernel makes my system unbootable

[Robert P. J. Day]

  some strange things happening here -- for the first time, after i
configured and built a new kernel, i ran "make deb-pkg" to turn it
into a .deb package file, then used "dpkg" to install that, after
which i still apparently had to run the appropriate incantations of
"update-initramfs" and "update-grub", then i rebooted.

  the boot process is clearly trying to boot the new kernel
(2.6.35-rc4+), only to fail with an error trying to mount the root
filesystem.  no problem, thinks i, i'll just reboot, drop into GRUB
and select the earlier, working kernel ... except that nothing i do
will get me to GRUB -- not SHIFT, ESC or TAB.  when i installed my ner
kernels manually, SHIFT always worked, but now, i have no idea what's
changed.

  i suspect i'll boot off of the CD and poke around, but i'm open to
suggestions -- why would this have happened?  and is there
*something* that will get me to GRUB?

rday

-- 

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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Top-notch, inexpensive online Linux/OSS/kernel courses
                        http://crashcourse.ca

Twitter:                                       http://twitter.com/rpjday
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