Guys, In my impatience, I thought maybe there was some connection between the kernel and the nvidia drivers. So I installed all the .2129 nvidia stuff. This effectively killed the system with a half dozen errors on boot up. Now get this, since I also have 2 IDE drives attached with an old install of Fedora, I set the BIOS to boot off the IDE drive instead of the SCSI I was working on. Amazingly (explain this if you can) the system still booted on the SCSI drive but the update was now intact and it loaded everything beautifully and everything works. I can mount the IDE drives but the system insists on booting from the SCSI, even though BIOS tells it to do otherwise. So now, /boot (on the SCSI) has all the .2129 files the way it's supposed to. Before, /boot had all .2115 files. And /boot on the IDE drive is now totally empty. I suppose there is reason the IDE /boot dir is empty but why the SCSI miraculously fixed itself is a mystery to me. Thanks for replies.
