I upgraded my kernel today and when I rebooted my boot splash screen still showed the previous kernel. When I selected it I got error 15 because, of course, the previous kernel is no longer there. I edited grub to show the new kernel and it booted fine. I checked /boot /grub/menu.lst and it looked fine with my new kernel listed. I rebooted and the splash screen again showed the previous kernel. I even deleted the old menu.lst file that still contained the older kernel version but that didn't help.

My boot splash screen still shows the old kernel even though the menu.lst file shows the new one. Any one know what the glitch is? I have to manually enter the new kernel everytime in order to boot. Any suggestions?

yup: menu.lst is read only, change flags and give write access.

I know what write access means but then what? menu.lst looks ok to me.

Does your menu.lst point to the kernel binary directly, or does it point to the link vmlinuz? Maybe you need to redirect this link to the new kernel (same with initrd). Also a few more informations could help (menu.lst, the name of your new kernel, the way you updated, etc.)

Are you using a mirror RAID1?

Add the entries you use for mannual method in grub.conf and then re-install grub. We are not sure how exactly you upgraded the kernel so can't say what it did. Also what ramram29 is saying could be related.

Additionally a very strange but could be possible ( i have seen some cases like that )..where the boot partition is unmounted when kernel is installed so it gets installed on / ( with a folder /boot on it ). I mean not on the additional partition for boot.

First, thanks for the replys. I'm not using RAID. I updated from the opensuse repos from kernel 2.6.18.8-129 to 2.6.18.8-198. Everything I looked at in /boot referred to the newer kernel. /usr/src/ still has two folders for 2.6.18.8-129 but none of the symbolic links in /boot point to them.

Those entries are already in /boot/grub/menu.lst:

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: SUSE Linux 10.1 (/dev/sda4)###
title SUSE Linux 10.1 (/dev/sda4)
kernel (hd0,3)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/sda4 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent showopts
initrd (hd0,3)/boot/initrd

title Kernel-2.6.18.8-198-default
root (hd0,1)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-198-default root=/dev/sda2 vga=0x317 resume=/dev/sda1 splash=silent showopts
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.18.8-198-default

The first one is an install of openSUSE 10.3 alpha 2. It says the title is SUSE Linux 10.1 but the splash screen says openSUSE 10.3. 10.3 Failsafe is also on the boot splash screen even though it's not listed in menu.lst. I haven't been able to find the config file that is generating the boot splash screen with the older kernel.

OK, it seems you have two Linux installations on sda1 and sda4. What if grub reads menu.lst from the other partition? In this case you are changing the wrong file.

I finally found the entry for the older kernel using the YaST boot configuration tool. I deleted it and made the new kernel the default and everything is back to normal. Thanks for the input.