Hi You may be able to do some tricks for saving your system but I don't know if you save time on it. If it boots and dpkg works, then you can download initrdtools by hand and do dpkg -i initrd*.deb. What I can recommend is that you use dselect to select the packages you really want to upgrade or install and that you install apt-listbugs before installing anything else. Then it should not happen again.
Hope it helps Gudjon Þann Sunnudagur 21 janúar 2007 18:58 skrifaði smugzilla: > I'm trying a fresh install of debian on my old Athlon 64 3200 box and > this one is not proceeding as smoothly as the previous one. The initial > install is smooth enough (I'm not even trying to install gnome yet) but > I'm having problems as soon as I try to upgrade to sid. Basically the > chain of events looks like this: > > 1. After the initial install I'm running kernel 2.6.8-12-em64t-p4-smp. I > have no idea why I appear to have an smp-enabled kernel, but this is > what I get when doing a basic install without tweaking the default > settings. 2. I change my repositories to point to sid at Arizona. > 3. apt-get update runs fine... > 4. But when I run apt-get dist-upgrade I get a prompt with a warning > that essentially says "You are running a kernel and attempting to remove > the same version." I choose "No" when asked if I really want to remove > the running kernel, then get two more error messages: > "dpkg: error procecssing kernel-image-2.6.8.12..." > "dpkg: initrd-tools: dependency problems, but removing anyway" > > After this my system seems pretty hosed: initrd-tools is gone and so I > can't install any non-trivial packages and base-config is gone. Where > did I screw up, and how do I fix this? Doing a fresh install and > starting again from scratch is definitely an option here.