Massive boot failure -- need serious help

["David Bellows" <bfootdav@mindspring.com>]

Hello all,

Some bad things just happened to me.  I was innocently trying to update a
few packages to unstable.  Unfortunately doing so broke some things.  And
then I kept trying to upgrade more and more things hoping it would
eventually all work until I ended up upgrading the entire thing to Woody
including the kernel.  Ok, now when I boot I get the following error that
seems to repeat forever without stopping:

/lib/modules/2.2.17/misc/unix.o: insmod net-pf-1 failed
/lib/modules/2.2.17/misc/unix.o: cannot create
/var/log/ksymoops/20001020xxx.ksyms Read-only file \ system

The "xxx" keep increasing.  As I said, this just keeps going and I can't
make it stop to continue to the boot process.  I was using the default
kernel that came with 2.2 so I wasn't too worried about upgrading to the
latest kernel.  But something has gone wrong.

OK, my original boot disk has died on me though my Debian 2.2 CDs are
working, but I really don't want to reinstall.  I do have this generic linux
rescure CD that is able to boot and with it I am able to mount the
partitions that Debian uses, so I can modify things if I only knew what.
What I need to know is what the heck is going on and is there something I
can change somewhere to get my system to some usable state?

Please someone help,
David Bellows