My main point in starting this thread was to ask how to go about fixing this kind of thing, especially since it is the second time this has happened to me and I'm tired of rebuilding my NIT.

I am a person that has been running Debian "Unstable" on his desktop PC for many years and updates on it sometimes go bad too. The difference is that I have always been able to go in and fix it (ususally by just adding a few extra flags to the package manager commands). I would love to come up with a proceedure for doing the same with the NIT so I won't be so terrified everytime I do an update.

Is there some kind of better boot loader where I have the option to bail out of the normal boot procedure when it fails? How do I fix my NIT now or is it a doorstop?

Oh and as far as the upgrade command, it was the 33mb "Feature upgrade" that I just told the application manager to install. The command I used to attempt to re-flash the NIT, which was exactly what I used last time with exactly the same files and it worked was:

./flash -r RX=44_DIABLO_4.2008-23-14_PR_COMBINED_MR0_ARM.bin -f -R

It is possible that I flashed it from a different Linux last time however. My Desktop dual-boots into either Slackware or Debian and I'm unsure which one I used. I tried it from Debian this time, but then I also tried it from Slack with exactly the same result. Also both of these Linux installs have had many updates too over that time but did appear to be doing USB related things just fine.

My desktop also has W2k on it (I lied about "dual-boot", it actually "triple-boots") so I can try the Windows flasher too, but I suspect it would have the same result, any comments?