Upgrading to Fedora 9 from Fedora 8 fails

[Douglas Otis]

This failure happened on two separate systems in an identical fashion,  
an AMD Athlon, and an Intel dual core.

The upgrade appeared to operate normally, but then Grub shows a kernel  
of 2.6.25.6-27.fc8, X11 fails, with a text prompt of Fedora release 9.

Yum fails and reports a phython module of _sha256 is missing.  The  
phython, lib, and crypto versions look current, but some have a .fc8  
extension instead of the .fc9.

It would appear whatever happened to phython, prevented Grub from  
being configured for Fedora 9.

Is there a simple way out, other than depending upon backups  
working?   I have been doing upgrades in this manner since Fedora 2.   
This is the first time an upgrade resulted in such a puzzle.  Is there  
something about the number 9 and desktop versions from RH?

Should I attempt to install the .fc9 versions of phython?

Advice would be appreciated, to help void making this a worse mess.

--MtView