hi jasee,
You will be having a second kernel alongside the old one.
You may boot up any one and grub will show both options during booting.
Ok now which command gave you the errors and what are the errors ?
nishith

I posted two replies , they are not showing up here.
Did you get them
nishith

Yes, I did thanks. And thanks for your help. I got pages of warning trying to assign nonexistent symbol messages as I mentioned earlier, and someone off the list warned me that it was dangerous to change to such a late kernel. Other things could stop working. So basically I didn't risk it. I ran a Knoppix live cd on the machine and got ntfs support through that. Thought it's been incredibly slow, it's supposed to be usb2, yet it's taken me over twelve hours to transfer 47gbyes of well compressed files. I only needed NTFS it to import the files. Thanks very much for your help, anyway. I appreciate the trouble you've gone to.

that's okay
bye
nishith