My exhilaration was fated to be short-lived. Could not reboot or shutdown after it, had to power-off manually (Ctrl+Alt+Del, Alt+SysRq+b, nothing worked), the screen just froze. Could not boot into the partition again either. Had kept linux-image-3.16 so i could boot into it from the reFind menu. Foolishly i thought the old kernel was causing some conflict and removed it. Since when i posted a comment here several hours ago, countless manual shutdowns and reboots later, after trying everything i could, and somehow after doggedly following this Debian Wiki despite the host of errors i got while doing it, mixing it with some steps of an old recover-grub hack of legacy-grub days, this is the second time i have been able to boot into it. Now i'm a spent force and i am not shutting this down until i some kind soul guides me or i resign myself to reinstalling.
PS: I had a look a the Debian package list before i went ahead with my stupid move and after installing all the "depends on" packages, i thought i had it covered.

Reinstall gru. & check this 1 out.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1793058

The sly old pros here probably knew my endeavor was doomed to failure, what with my warped partition table complicated by reFind. Even though i managed in the end to reinstall grub-efi and grub as per the wiki i mentioned without error, the Partition numbers were still all wrong. Add to that this new *&*& kernel, even after wiped my laptop clean and reinstalled, still wouldn't boot after upgrading the repos to Stretch and a dist-upgrade. One good thing came out of it all..i learned how to use vi, not just the new and improved vim with added functionality, but the bare old one..

Am never going near Stretch or ever upgrading to kernel 4.0+, EVER! Not on this laptop. :Ptooey!

Downloaded Stretch installer Alpha 2 https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/

Installed on the partition next to LMDE Betsy. (Betsy has always made life easy for me while this high maintenance shrew Jessie is a pain in the nether regions right from installation to getting anything done with her, just getting her a mirror that works is a long struggle).

The installation went smoothly, got no errors but the effin' thing just wouldn't boot. Tried recovery, grub rescue, you name it..

Alright, i said, maybe she doesn't play nice with others around. Wiped the laptop clean, created the ESP, swap, etc partitions just for it. Still it would freeze as before after the efsck2 clean message.

That was it, reinstalled Betsy in it's rightful place and reinstalled the old Jessie and swore never to upgrade on this machine. Dunno why i put up with it, to save a few seconds of boot time, a measly couple of hundred MBs of Ram? It's like living with a partner you can't stand but do not let go off because you have been through too much together.

You omitted the most important piece of information: What Desktop were you using? Was it, by chance, KDE? I'm also using Stretch and running the 4.1-6.dmz.1-liquorix-amd64 kernel. There have been major problems with KDE. I'm happy to say that after an update of 41 packages this morning KDE is back up and running.

If you weren't running KDE then ignore what's written above.
jdk

Yep, i have been following your KDE post. No, i don't have a desktop environment, just a Window Manager, and that's after reinstalling and reconfiguring back everything from scratch again on my PC. When i tried out Stretch it wouldn't even boot on a minimal bare bones install, not even when there was no other operating system or it's bootloader that could have possibly been blamed for it. It just doesn't work on my hardware. (Asus x553ma). I could go on and stretch this further by posting my lspci and other specs but why prolong the agony, it won't help any, believe me.

With respect it sounds like you're doing it wrong. I've been running Sid on my desktop for quite some time and upgrading a kernel is one of the least disruptive things I can think of -- it either boots or does not and if it does not then select an older one. The uninstalling of the older kernel was the mistake you've admitted to but I suspect you made a few more also. We all do make mistakes.

No doubt, and i assure you i am my own worst critic. My first attempt was by changing my sources.list to stretch and upgrading, and there was always the possibility of conflicts with residual old packages, but this time i tried it with the official Stretch Alpha 2 release, and did a clean Netinstall from it on a machine wiped clean as a whistle, and the results were identical. I am not saying it broke, or messed up anything. All i am saying is that it just wouldn't boot on my h/w, and would freeze after displaying the first 3-4 lines of the messages that roll out the screen during boot. After that i'd would have to power off manually. And i was so eager to try out the new kernel..ah well, it didn't take me long to configure back everything as it was, even ironed out the few wrinkles of the previous installs, all in all, this kernel ain't for me.

The thing is that you don't need to dist-upgrade to use a new kernel you could even compile one from www.kernel.org to make.deb files for the kernel and headers and install those.
Whatever it is you're doing is a lot more complicated than it needs to be.

Thanks, i might actually have another go at it after i feel energized enough. These last two attempts have really drained me, and i mean physically, was up all night going at it like a crazy person this time, you have no idea how many mirrors i tried before i found one with which i could get past the Install Software stage without errors. :lol Will have to read up on the compiling bit though, never done it before. Until now it has always been by clicking the package in synaptic or updating and upgrading..

Just adding mirrors to sources.list will only end in problems. You probably can apt-pin and use experimental or similar to install the latest kernel but just adding a mirror then dist-upgrading is likely to be a bad idea.
For compiling see here:
https://www.debian.org/releases/whee...h08s06.html.en
And here:
http://mapopa.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/compiling-2.html
The blog post does everything as root but until the install time there is no need to be root, and as I understand it fakeroot takes car of building the package with the correct permissions.

Nooo, i was talking about getting one after being given the option to choose one during a NetInstall.

Thanks again, this will come in handy. Bookmarked for later. If it's alright, i am marking this thread as solved for all intents and purposes.

Sorry, I missed that. I don't think that kernel 4.2 is actually ready to install fro mthe Debian repositories -- certainly when I search with apt it's showing as a release candidate which in my experience means that things like kernel headers may be missing meaning that third-party drivers (NVIDIA and VirtualBox in my case) which have to be compiled against the kernel can't be used easily. I would install the 4.1 kernel as everything is there and it works fine. Then you could compile the kernel as shown as that will take care of everything.

Kernel 4.1 is available from the jessie-backports repository.
https://packages.debian.org/jessie-b...ux-image-amd64

https://wiki.debian.org/Backports

I know, upgraded from synaptic the first time..and i have narrated the sad tale that followed;

Thought a direct fresh install of Stretch from the official release ISO would make a difference, as i said, the results were identical. Compiling from the pristine source is something that i have yet to give a shot.