Now, since you encouraged me -
When running the dist-upgrade unstable, grub, which I have installed to the partition which I use for testing things, for obvious reasons, reverts to calling the drives by the (hd0,0) &c, which should work fine.
However, in removing all the appended lines, including UUID, the sata needs(ide1=noprobe &c) and setting them to default values, the system no longer recognises the boot partition.
Your workaround is correct, i e, somehow boot into the system(there is a live cd from Austria that helps a lot in doing stuff this) run update, add the necessary parameters, re-install grub to the appropriate place, and go.
Why the aptitude install erases the menu.lst in favour of a default I cannot say, but the workaround is simple.
Thanks, Mika, as usual, since your workaround indeed worked.
Now, of course, I can no longer figure out why udev works differently with lilo, but the exercise was fun.
Gruesse aus NY,
M