(I think I accidentally replied to poster instead of list on this one last night, so reposting)
I am 90% certain it's grub2. The machine was running some variant of Lenny or Squeeze Debian before I made an ill-advised upgrade, I'm pretty sure Debian upgraded from grub1 to grub2 back in the days of sarge or etch. That was it's own fresh hell, I recall. ;)
From here I can't get to my linux boot environment to check via dpkg. I think the environment is keyed toward a 3.x kernel thus my 4 other 2.6 variants are also unbootable. Also spent this evening trying out tomsrtbt floppy. Grub displays (fd0) as an item and disk drive lights when I try to ls (fd0), but then it says "Device fd0: Filesystem cannot be accessed // error: no such disk". Same error as empty drive. Floppy mounts fine in other computers and passes "badblocks -w" test, I suspect it could be tomsrtbt's 1.8MB hack. This ancient server may not support the additional capacity. *shrugs*
When I run "help" at grub command line I don't see any "version" command or similar to clarify 1.98 vs 1.99 or such. If there is a way to discern from grub> prompt, or if that's relevant then I'm all ears. :)
- - Jesse