please help with legacy grub

[Christopher Moore]

Greg,
Here are a couple of things you could try.
First, there is a grub rescue floppy disk which should help you fix your grub problems.  You might need sighted assistance to run it.  I forget the name
, but you can google it.

Second, in the old days, we were able to copy the vmlinuz image to a floppy with dd and boot from it.

Third, when grub doesn't boot successfully, you can get into a shell prompt.  This allows you to use many of the normal shell commands to help determine 
what went wrong.  In particular, you can mount devices and move/copy files.  Again, you won't have speech.  

Finally, save yourself from further headaches and trash the machine.

Chris