Can't boot

[Luiz alberto Medaets]

I have an 10 years old notebook (500MHz Pentium, 256M memory, 6G HD)that I use 
as a netbook at the beach house.
The PS2 device is damaged so I use an external USB mouse and keyboard that are 
not recognized by BIOS, that is, until Xubuntu is loaded, I have no mouse and / 
or keyboard.
It was working fine but during last boot the battery was discharged and
it fail to boot. Now every time I tried to boot the Grub menu appears
and waits for me to hit a kernel option to boot with. The problem is
that I can't, as my USB keyboard at this point doesn't work.
The only solution I found is to reinstall Xubuntu from CD, but if I do
it, I will loose all my data on the HD.
Is there a way to disable the Grub menu so it will never be prompted again and 
always boot from a specific kernel?
Regards,
Luiz Alberto Medaets