[lug] New Fedora 23 Install Quirks

[stimits at comcast.net]

Hi,
 
It was time to upgrade an x86_64 Fedora 19 machine by install of Fedora 23/KDE spin onto a new partition (leaving the old F19 file system unaltered in any way, also a KDE spin). The Fedora 19 install is still there, but for whatever reason is no longer bootable despite using grub previously as well (no change to partitioning occurred, only pre-existing partitions were used). I'm curious as to why the old F19 locks up during boot now when it did not previously. This is the mystery I'm curious about, in part because I forgot to export my firefox bookmarks and the easiest migration would be if I rebooted to F19 and exported bookmarks then back to F23 to import (there are other details I'd like to be able to have access to the old F19 for, this is just the most important to get fixed fast...migrating everything instantly was not in the plan).
 
The details of the install are that this machine has always had two SATA drives, sda being entirely for windows 7, sdb entirely for Fedora. Fedora 19 has been on a 300 GB partition of sdb a long time, with grub booting win7/sda and F19/sdb. The drives have always been using regular partitions, no LVM, and partitions and disk layout has always been old style BIOS, no UEFI. No partitions were changed, the extra partition for the new install was put in place several years ago for the purpose of future upgrades. Each install has placed everything on a single partition without any complicated scheme, e.g., the /boot and /home are all within the main root partition, not as separate partitions.
 
What I discovered is that the F19 boot console text (I always remove "rhgb" and "quiet" from kernel arguments) for some reason is blocking or locking up when it gets to USB devices. I can remove any/all of the USB devices, it still does this...and there has been no change in USB topology. So far as I know, the firmware and initrd files and everything related to boot are exactly as they were previously in the F19 /boot directory. I'm thinking that somehow the new F23 grub menu somehow alters the boot environment or kernel parameters that the F19 originally used. What exactly could I diff or compare between F23 boot loader and F19 boot loader to understand why F19 boot fails?
 
As an aid in case things went bad, I saved a dd copy of the first 63 512-byte blocks of both sda and sdb prior to upgrade.
 
Thanks!
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