HD Install :: Stuck attempting frugal grup upgrade

I attempted a frugal grub upgrade to 3.2 via apps/tools after booting from the cdrom. Ver 2.3 image was on hda1, so I attempted writing the image there. After noting that image was written, I got the familiar "no space left on device" error (I thought initial format was set up with plenty of additional space, but perhaps it configured for only what it needed). Now the computer gets stuck at the "uncompressing linux. OK, booting the kernel..." stage. I thought, wrongly, that it would boot up from the cdrom as previously. I tried editing the grub start-up menu, which allows me to edit the boot-up config (e..e..), changing "dev/hda1" to "dev/scd1" (/mnt/cdrom1...I use a USB cdrom since the cdrom on my laptop is a piece of junk; no luck.
I'm trying to find a way out of this morass....(perhaps if I can just get to Fdisk or something....)

I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to do with the CDROM. Do you need a boot floppy to get the USB drive to load the live CD?

How big is the partition you installed to? Get the output from the following command:
fdisk -l /dev/hda

Afaik grub has no built-in usb support (at least by default).

You can try to set your BIOS to boot off it.

I'd recommend for you somehow get back into an environment where you can do what lucky13 suggested.

I haven't found a way to get past the Grub commands, as it goes right to "Grub ver.91" when turned on. Grub commands allow "minimal Bash-line editing" (nothing that I can find to get me to run Fdisk,etc.).
My laptop doesn't have a floppy drive, so that option is out. Yuk......

BIOS is set to boot off CDROM first. As I noted, I'm using an external cdrom player, which worked fine booting the live CD, but apparantly there's no support to boot from the grub command menu.

run fdisk while on the DSL livecd

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