One other option to see if this is a hardware issue would be to boot from a LiveCD of a release that you know it was working on before. That would not only test that kernel, but other packages in the release that may have caused an issue.
One other option to see if this is a hardware issue would be to boot from a LiveCD of a release that you know it was working on before. That would not only test that kernel, but other packages in the release that may have caused an issue.